


An Atlas Of Uncharted Lands

by pipistrelle



Category: She-Ra and the Princesses of Power (2018)
Genre: An Unconscionable Amount of Snuggling, F/F, Family, Fluff, Fluff and Angst, Forgiveness, Gen, Glimmer & Scorpia, HORDE KID STUFF IS IN CH 5, Hurt/Comfort, Kinda Glimmer Focused Because I Love Her, Kyle/Rogelio/Lonnie, Lesbians in Space, Minor Bow/Jewelstar, Minor Kyle/Rogelio (She-Ra), Multi, Navigating Past Trauma, Polyamory, Post-Canon, Post-Finale Space Adventures, Post-Series, Relationship Negotiation
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-06-05
Updated: 2020-07-25
Packaged: 2021-03-04 05:20:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 23,903
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24528277
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pipistrelle/pseuds/pipistrelle
Summary: Adora, Catra, and Glimmer (and friends) after the war with Prime: bringing magic to the universe, exploring space, and falling in love. Turns out all three of those things are kind of the same thing.
Relationships: Adora/Catra (She-Ra), Adora/Catra/Glimmer (She-Ra), Adora/Glimmer (She-Ra), Catra/Glimmer (She-Ra)
Comments: 39
Kudos: 256





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Prompt fills exploring my own personal post-finale heartcanon, in which everyone gets to be each others' girlfriends. In space.

**a solemn vow**

“Hey, Catra!”

She’s already turning towards the sound of running boots, fangs bared, claws ready to lash out at the first unprotected skin she can reach. Old habits. 

It takes another heartbeat for the rest of her brain to catch up: _We just won a war, it’s not like they’d send guards after you for stealing cupcakes, idiot._ And it’s not even like she really _stole_ them; they were just sitting out on a tree stump in the middle of the Rebellion’s impromptu victory party, completely unguarded, ripe for the plucking. They’re for Adora anyway, and if Catra has her way, anyone who keeps Adora from getting what she wants tonight is getting shot directly into space.

But the cheerful light of the festival fires show no squadron of silver-helmed guards chasing her, and no mob of fluttery villagers with pitchforks. It’s only Glimmer.

Like _that’s_ not still weird. It’s only Glimmer, the Queen of the alliance Catra was very recently at war with, running to catch up to her under the open sky of a free Etheria, wreathed in smiles and starlight. 

“Hey.” Catra slows, but tucks the bag with the cupcakes behind her, just in case Glimmer’s feeling inclined to settle accounts. Then she grits her teeth, forces past that instinct to hoard, to hide. That’s not how things are going to be anymore. She’s going to learn what it’s like to have friends; she promised Adora.

At least, she’s pretty sure she promised Adora. She’s said and done a lot of gross, humiliating, dazzlingly wonderful things with Adora in the last few hours, in the haze of post-adrenaline world-saving joy. She’s done and said things that, a year ago, she would have died by torture to avoid even admitting to herself that she was thinking about. But gross, humiliating, stupidly happy sharing and caring is going to be her life now, so she might as well start living it.

She holds out the bag. “Want one? They’re, uh...technically yours, I guess.”

“I have to talk to you.” Glimmer’s arm is in hers, steering her insistently away from Adora and the festival, out into the night full of flowers. 

“Okay,” Catra starts to say, but Glimmer’s still talking: “You saved my life on Horde Prime’s ship. You saved Adora. I mean, you saving Adora probably saved the world, but even if it didn’t -- you _saved Adora_. I’m really, really glad that you’re with us. And I’m so happy you two are together. I really am!”

“Okay,” Catra says again. “Is this -- a happy conversation? Because it kind of feels like --”

Glimmer pulls Catra to a stop, like they’ve arrived somewhere, but as far as Catra can tell it’s just a patch of faintly glowing clover the same as all the other disconcerting magical clover. There’s desperation in Glimmer’s grip on her arm. Catra fights the urge to pull away, but she can’t stop her hackles starting to rise.

“I know you and Adora grew up together, but she’s my best friend. Bow doesn’t want to mess up the Best Friends Squad, and I don’t _either_ , but I know he won’t ask. And I just -- I have to ask you.”

She stops. Catra can’t keep her ears from easing flat, her tail from puffing up in alarm. She knew this was coming. Adora promised her a home, and happiness, but Adora’s a naive blockhead who’s been making promises she can’t keep since she was six. The good guys won, and they’re finished with Catra now. No need to humor Shadow Weaver’s cast-off anymore for She-Ra’s sake. The Rebellion’s the same as it’s always been; sparkles and cupcakes in one hand, a knife in the other.

She’ll fight the whole damn war all over if she has to. She won't leave Adora again.

Quiet, desperate, nervous, Glimmer says, “Is this real? Tell me the truth. If any of this is some kind of trick -- to break her heart, or to hurt her --”

Catra watches her with narrowed eyes for a heartbeat. Suddenly she reverses Glimmer’s grip, gets a hand around Glimmer's wrist, claw-tips pressing gently into the skin below her gauntlet, scraping over the delicate pulse point there. Startled, Glimmer clenches her other hand around a flicker of violet flame, acid-bright, aimed to wound. Old habits.

Catra's hand slides down over Glimmer's until their palms press together, their fingers interlock. 

"Is that all?" she asks lightly. The confusion on Glimmer’s face makes her grin. "It’s all right, you can say it: you and Bow will kill me if I hurt her.”

Glimmer’s actually flustered. It’s kind of cute. “That’s not what I --”

“Yes it is. I’m surprised it took you this long. Actually --” Catra squeezes her hand, not hard enough to hurt, but because it seems like the kind of thing Adora usually does when she’s being especially earnest. “I want you to. I want you to make it a promise."

Glimmer gapes at her. “What?"

"I know I've hurt Adora a lot." Glimmer’s look hardens for a heartbeat into something cold and sharp as crystal. Catra winces. "A lot. I know, okay? I don't… I don't want to do that anymore. But I worry sometimes… I mean, I don't know if I know how to do anything else." She steels herself, throws her shoulders back as though she's marching before a battalion of Horde Prime's battle drones. "Will you stop me? If I do?"

The magic dies from Glimmer's hands, leaving night lit only by the clover and the stars. But Catra can’t see it, because her field of vision is suddenly full of sparkling hair and her arms are full of twinkling, weepy royalty. She almost drops the cupcakes. 

This is part of her new life, too. Catra closes her eyes, holds herself still, breathing, feeling. Scorpia’s hugs felt like getting up close and personal with a cuddly armor-plated trash compactor, and Adora keeps touching her with the gentleness of terror and loss, like she’s afraid Catra will shatter into pixels any second. Bow was warm, solid, dependable. Hugging Glimmer feels a little bit like floating, with no fear that she’s going to fall. 

"Oh, Catra. Just do your best, okay? I'll help you, if you need it. We all will."

Safe where Glimmer can’t see it, Catra rolls her eyes. "No, see, you're supposed to say, 'Yes, Catra, I'll skin you alive if you stab any of us in the back again', that way I'll have a good reason not to do it. Do you Princesses not know how _anything_ works?"

"Don't worry, Adora had to learn all this stuff too," Glimmer says into her shirt.

"Useless, all of you," Catra sighs, but she doesn’t huff and wriggle away. It’s a start.

**coming home**

They knew about the spire in Bright Moon, but it was one of a hundred reports terrified refugees brought in from every corner of Etheria: the Sea Gate at Salineas is broken, the Kingdom of Snows is mutilated by lava-flows, Dryl is crumbling. There’s a spire in Bright Moon. There was never time to think about it. Catra probably would never have thought much about it even if there had been time.

It isn’t until the world around her is already blurring pink that she thinks maybe she should have stayed behind for this mission. Bright Moon isn’t her place, and she knows enough about the mindset of conquering dictators to know that whatever they find there won’t be pretty. But Adora’s hand is warm in hers, even through the blink of nowhere-space like a skipped heartbeat. Adora asked her to come. Adora came to her with this ridiculous nervous look on her face and held both of her hands and said _You don’t have to, but I want --_ , and it’s not like Catra could say no to that.

Glimmer lands them in the hot sun, on the sere cliffs that guard the western approach to the lake. A sound tactical position. Catra knows; she stationed her own Horde forces there once, a lifetime ago.

The spire is so huge and so close it breaks the scale of the mountains. Two weeks exposed to the elements and Etheria’s new magical overgrowth have eaten away its sleek, fluted outline, and now it looks like a gigantic broken bone, raw and jagged in places, leaning dangerously over the Whispering Woods. One massive spidery leg is rusting in the lake, another lies buckled in the ruins of the village. The third leg impaled the palace when it landed, burst it like an eggshell and scattered pieces of delicate silvery masonry across the valley.

Glimmer gasps, somewhere on Adora’s other side. Bow whimpers. Micah wraps an arm around each of them, hugging them close, but only for a moment; then Bow is striding forward with his tracker pad, scanning for any live bots or munitions left. Glimmer pulls away from her father, stands straight and steady again, head thrown back to look up at the looming wreck, hands on her hips, tears in her eyes. Bruised but unbowed, every inch the Queen.

Adora rests a hand on Glimmer’s shoulder. Her other hand is still in Catra’s. "We'll rebuild it. It'll be beautiful."

"Of course it will." Glimmer squeezes Adora's hand, glances at her face and then at Catra, half-slinking in Adora's shadow. In this old battleground it’s hard not to put her ears back and hiss, not to dig her claws into Adora’s arm, but she chokes the memory down.

“All clear,” Bow calls from the cliff’s edge, and Glimmer takes them down to the shores of the lake, into the spire’s shadow.

For three days they investigate every inch of the valley. Bow takes measurements; Glimmer and Adora move heavy things around; Micah weeps a lot, and doesn’t seem to care that they see him doing it. Catra sticks close to Adora, helping when it looks like they can use her, keeping her head down, staying out of the way. At night their little band camps in the ruined luxury of the palace. When Micah falls asleep, Glimmer breaks down, sobbing quietly into the feather mattress they dragged out of a collapsed bedchamber. Catra doesn’t know if it’s because she doesn’t have to put on a brave face for him anymore, or if she thinks his snoring will cover the sound. It doesn’t.

Bow’s the one who goes to her, strokes her hair, says soft meaningless things like _it’s okay, it’ll be okay_. Catra lies still, half on top of Adora, eyes closed, listening. Adora’s body is relaxed; she's perfectly comfortable sleeping flat on her back with nothing but a thin bed of gauze curtains to cushion the flagstone floor. But long after Glimmer and Bow fall asleep she lies awake, staring up through the cracked ribs of the vaulted ceiling at the stars, brooding. 

On the fourth day Adora goes and sits next to Glimmer in the shade of a crumbling wall, in what used to be a pleasure garden. Catra climbs the wall’s crest and sits with her feet dangling off it so they just brush Adora’s shoulders. From up there she can watch the deft movements of Adora’s hands as she starts slicing up an apple with one of Micah’s knives that he made from the fangs of a saber-toothed sheep. (Apparently it’s a Beast Island thing. Catra didn’t ask.)

Glimmer stares at the muddy surface of the polluted reflecting pool for a while, seeing something far away. “Hey,” Adora says. “It’s not your fault.”

“If I hadn’t -- ” Glimmer starts, and lets the sentence hang unfinished. She takes the piece of apple Adora hands her and says instead, “Bow and Dad and I have been working on plans for the new palace. I know Scorpia's planning to turn the Fright Zone back into what it was before Hordak, and if you'd rather live where you grew up, I'll understand. But there will be a place for you here, too." She looks at Adora, then straight up, pinning Catra like a shadow in a sunbeam. " _Both_ of you."

"Angella told me I’d always have a home here,” Adora says softly. Catra winces. But even saying the name aloud doesn’t make Glimmer explode in rage or lash out at her mother’s murderer, like she probably should have done days ago. Like Catra’s been waiting for her to all along. 

Instead Glimmer leans her head on Adora’s shoulder. “Catra? What about you? We could give you a tower. Adora said you like heights.”

Adora’s fingers tug gently at the end of her tail. Still wary, Catra slides down the wall and settles on Adora’s other side. It feels safer that way. Adora’s warm from working all day in the sun, warmer than she is when they’re curled up together at night, and there’s something in the way her hand clenches on the hilt of the sheep-tooth knife, something in the way her boot scuffs an arc in the dust; she looks like she did when she asked Catra to come with them to Bright Moon. Like the next thing she’ll say is _I want_ \--

Cute, creepy magical bird-centipedes sing harmonies in the hedges. Catra looks up at the shadow of the spire, pretending she doesn’t notice Adora’s hand finding hers. "I've seen Scorpia's plans. Changing the name to 'the Nice Zone' and covering everything in sequins isn't gonna make that place any less of a dump. At least _this_ dump isn't full of toxic waste."

“Good,” Glimmer says, and sounds like she means it. 

Adora says, “It won’t be easy, but we’ll make it happen,” in her stupid hero voice, the one that’s warm and strong as the stone at her back. Catra doesn’t know whether she means the actual construction that’ll turn this wreck into something habitable, or the other thing; this, the three of them, sitting in peace and sunlight, all the barriers down. 

"It’d be stupid not to," Catra murmurs. "I've been trying for literally years to get here. Might as well stay."

**when words aren't enough**

"Catra! She's doing it again!"

Adora slices another shadow-ghoul neatly in half and lets the sword clank to a stop on the floor. Sword, ghouls, and Adora's armor glitch and disappear, leaving her sweating empty-handed in Darla's little training simulator. "Doing what?" she pants. Glimmer's just standing in the doorway, grinning.

Catra saunters past and peers over Glimmer's shoulder. "Don't stop, Adora. Here." She fiddles with the controls. The sword reappears by Adora's hand, balanced perfectly on its point. As soon as she touches it the shadow-ghouls will come back. They're only vague three-dimensional blurs, but their soulless red eyes are kind of terrifying, and Entrapta programmed the dismemberment protocols really well.

"I wasn't doing anything," Adora protests. "Just training. What was I doing?"

She’ll start to cramp if she doesn’t keep moving. As she grips the sword and swings it up into the first assault Glimmer says, "Every time you get one, you stop for a second and you make this face --"

"I don't -- make -- a face." Hack, slash, step. A ghoul goes hurtling by, trips on her boot, and disintegrates before it hits Catra lounging on the doorframe.

"You totally do," Catra informs her. "A sort of -- how would you describe it, Sparkles?"

"A hero face," Glimmer supplies.

"A big dumb hero face," Catra agrees. "Chiseled jaw, menacing eyes --"

"Have you been -- reading Bow's -- novels again?" Adora ducks a shadow-sword, spins into an underhanded thrust. Her last opponent dies with a ghostly gurgle, giving way to a hovering countdown: fifteen seconds until the next wave. Adora hefts her sword to her shoulder and turns to face her audience, who glance at each other and burst out laughing.

"The _pose_ ," Catra gasps, while Glimmer giggles, "your arms!"

Adora looks helplessly down at her arms. They look the same as they always do. "You guys are laughing at me for _having arms_?"

"Yes," they chorus, and collapse into howls and cackles.

The second wave of shadows swarms down on her. Adora turns to meet them. Out of the corner of her eye she sees Catra lean an elbow comfortably on Glimmer’s shoulder and drawl, "You know what, Sparkles? It's nice to hang out with someone who finally gets me."

The fluttery warm feeling in her stomach distracts her just enough that she goes down under a dog-pile of faceless fog-ghouls, and her brave cavalry are too busy ribbing each other and pointing to come to her rescue. But she can’t say she really minds.

**when words aren't enough, part II**

They follow Jewelstar’s distress signal into an asteroid field. It’s a blindingly obvious trap, but they can’t take the risk that Jewelstar and his family are being held and maybe hurt by a remaining splinter of Prime’s empire. By the time Bow figures out that the Star siblings are fighting their way out of an identical trap in the next system over, they’re deep in the bowels of the fortress, pinned down on three sides by laser fire, and Adora’s been blasted with some kind of reddish powder that coats her throat and lungs and _won’t let her transform_. 

Catra somersaults off a support beam and lands on the shoulders of a ship-sized tank-bot, punches through its optic panel and starts ripping out sparking, smoking coils of wire. The bot staggers and goes sideways. Adora tries to see if Catra gets clear, but she can't take her eyes off the three human-sized bots closing on her, trying to pin her. The green maw of a laser cannon spits light. She drops, smells the ozone as it scorches the wall overhead. With a grunt she grabs a loose steel bar from the rubble and smashes the gun-bot’s spindly knees, then whirls to catch the overhead strike from another bot’s blade-arm. 

“It’s a self-contained chip network!” Bow shouts from somewhere on the catwalk up by the ceiling. Adora hits another bot broadside, smashes its tiny turret-shaped head. It’s easier than aiming for the back of the neck. “They’re all coordinated --”

Another shriek cuts through the oily smoke and chaos. Catra’s voice, raw with terror: " _Glimmer!”_

Adora rolls, smashes the bot’s arm off while it tries to wrench its blade out of the floor, and looks frantically around for Glimmer. Up there, overhead. Falling, a pink-streaked comet from the highest rafters, already disintegrating in a burst of light to avoid -- 

\-- the gigantic metal scorpion crawling up out of a crack in the floor right behind Adora --

Glimmer’s arms are around her, whisking her away, but the pain gets there first and drowns the pink haze of teleportation in a burst of black.

-

Adora wakes, and wishes she hadn’t. Breathing hurts. Moving would probably hurt worse, but she’s afraid to try. She can remember that thing’s stinger as it plunged towards her. It was big as a sword, and without She-Ra...

Voices ebb and flow through the pain, familiar, demanding attention. Bow is saying “Darla, activate the First Ones First Aid protocol, access code alpha-Z-5-8 --”

But that’s not what woke her. With a monumental effort she opens her eyes, squinting against the splintering pain of light and motion. Bow's bent over her, frantic and terrified, wreathed in steam, holding up a vial filled with worryingly green liquid and a needle that doesn’t look too different from the scorpion’s stinger. Behind him, on the cold tile of Darla’s infirmary, a red-brown blur is making the sound that pulled her out of sleep -- a helpless quiver, a cry of pain. Catra. Catra’s huddled in on herself, curled as small as she can go, hands flat over her ears, shutting out the world. Making less of a target for the next blow. Whimpering, “I can’t -- she _can’t_ \-- not _again_ \--” 

Catra! Adora tries to move, to go to her, but her body might as well be a piece of virus-riddled bot scrap. _Help her,_ she tries to tell Bow, _you have to help her, you don’t know her like I do, this is bad, this is the worst it gets and she needs help, she can’t handle it alone!_

Then Bow takes a step back to do something to a control panel on the wall and Adora sees Glimmer sitting at Catra’s side, one arm around her shoulders and the other hand on her knee. Holding her gently, unobtrusively, with room to pull away. But Catra doesn’t pull away. She just keeps saying, “She can’t, she can’t --”

“I know,” Glimmer says, soft as gossamer, flexible as steel. “I know. It’s okay. She won’t.”

Bow glances over his shoulder. “Glimmer, are you --”

“We’re fine,” Glimmer answers through gritted teeth. Blood wells and drips from four identical slashes in her shoulder, but she doesn’t seem to notice. “Just help Adora.”

“Here goes,” Bow says, peering down the needle at her like it’s an arrow-shaft. “Hey, guys, I think she’s awa--”

-

When Adora wakes again she’s hot, muffled, and sticky, and in an amount of pain that’s definitely much closer to “bearable”. Cautious investigation reveals that her arms are still attached, and that there’s something big and soft on top of her, pressing her into the cot. Several somethings, actually. 

The challenge of opening her eyes is much easier to navigate this time. At first all she can see is fluff and velvet ears; Catra’s curled up beside and half on top of her, like any ordinary night, only the infirmary cot is half the size of the one in their bunk. The curve of her spine looks uncomfortably contorted, but her breathing is easy and even, her ear pressed to Adora’s chest over her heart.

The infirmary is dim and still. Adora lifts her head a little and catches the faint blue silhouette of Melog sprawled across her legs, and the fainter moonpearl shine in Glimmer’s disheveled hair. She looks even less comfortable than Catra, passed out in a chair next to the bed with one of Adora’s hands clutched in both of hers.

There’s a third glow; the friendly green of Bow’s tracker pad. He’s dragged in one of the hideous orange poofy chairs from the galley and propped his feet up on a spare power generator. Adora watches him trace idle patterns on the screen for a while. Then his eyes flick up to meet hers and he smiles, so broad and bright she’s surprised it doesn’t wake the others.

“Good morning,” he whispers, in the dark of ship’s night. “You feel okay?”

Adora thinks about it. She wiggles her fingers in Glimmer’s, feels that soft, stubborn grip tighten in answer, with no intention of letting go. Her other hand brushes lightly over the stiff mop of Catra’s hair, to the fine downy fluff at the nape of her neck and between her shoulderblades. Everything else, she thinks, can wait.

“Yeah,” she whispers back. Her voice is painful as a laser burn, but it makes Bow smile even brighter. “I’m good.”

**a stolen kiss**

"I'm coming with you," Adora says. "It's not safe out there."

Catra stops pacing back and forth in the mouth of the cave long enough to pretend to look thoughtful. "Wow, good point, Adora. And why isn't it safe? Is it because of, I don't know, just guessing here, the _poisonous people-eating alien plants?_ The ones that are attracted to -- what was it that they're attracted to again, Bow?"

"Magic," Bow says sternly.

"Oh, that's right! They're attracted to _magic_! So maybe the two people on this trip who are _full of magic_ should _stay in the cave_!"

"Catra's right," Bow says, and it's nice that they don't have to stop anymore to acknowledge that it's weird for him to say stuff like that. Because it's not weird. Because Catra's right _a lot_. Bow's waving his trusty pad around to prove it. "It really looks like these things only go after strong sources of magic — it’s probably a defense against the magical creatures we saw on the scanner. Catra and I will find a safe path back to the surface and call Darla down. Adora, you and Glimmer just stay here and relax. It'll be like a vacation! A dark, cold, kind-of slimy but refreshing vacation."

Catra and Glimmer both snort in disbelief. Glimmer says, "It would be faster if I just teleport us --"

Catra steeples her hands in front of her face. "I'm sorry, maybe I'm not making myself clear. Show of hands: who here glows sometimes?"

Glimmer sticks out her tongue. Adora scowls.

"Glowing people stay in the cave," Catra concludes. "Come on, Bow, let's find a way to get these useless princesses out of here."

-

Catra's job is to find a place in the swamplands above that's rocky enough for Darla to land on. Bow was saying something earlier about how if they try to land just anywhere the engines will turn all the muck and marsh-water into dangerous plumes of scalding-hot steam and possibly boil them all alive. Catra wants to half-suspect that he made that up and gave her this assignment just to make her slog through endless mud-puddles, but it's not the sort of prank he likes. It is, however, an excellent reason to get this whole trip over with as fast as possible.

Landing beacon planted, she bounds from ledge to branch down to the floor of the ravine, the only shelter they could find from the roots of the killer magic-eating trees. The smaller, more mobile ravenous vines haven't reached into the mouth of the cave yet, but they've grown by at least a tank's length since she left. At this rate they'll be gnawing on Glimmer and Adora by morning. If morning ever comes on this blasted planet. 

It's not like she doesn't _notice_ that Glimmer and Adora are kissing when she walks in. She's just busy thinking about vine-murder, and about not being soaked through with rancid marsh-water anymore. 

It is hilarious to watch them leap apart, though. And very gratifying to pretend not to notice their terrified expressions as she goes into Adora's discarded pack for a ration bar. "So, you two have fun while I was gone?"

Adora's face relaxes into a grin that's a little mortified, a little blissed-out, and a lot stupid-looking. Glimmer still looks terrified -- looks, in fact, like she might cry. "I'm sorry, Catra. Don't be mad at Adora. It was -- it was my fault."

Glimmer pissed off is usually funny; Glimmer on the verge of tears definitely isn't. "Mad? Why would I be mad?"

Glimmer bites her lip, pushes herself further away from Adora and Catra both. "If you want to pretend like this never happened, then I --"

"Slow down, Sparkles. I missed something here." Catra glances at Adora, who shrugs. "Why do you think I'd be mad at you for kissing Adora?"

Now it's Glimmer's turn to glance uncertainly from one of them to other. "I thought… aren't you two -- together?"

"Yeah." Catra breaks her ration bar in half and tosses one piece to Adora. "So?"

"So…" Glimmer pauses, goes through a familiar mental calculation: how to explain something she thought was totally normal to a couple of Horde-raised weirdos. "So in Bright Moon, usually people only date one person at a time."

"Really? That sounds boring. Adora, remember when Rogelio was dating, like, all of Blue Squad?"

"Except Rufus," Adora says through a mouthful of ration bar.

"Of course except Rufus, Rufus was awful. Rogelio has way better taste than that."

In a small voice, Glimmer says, "Aren't you afraid that I'll take her away from you?"

Catra can't help it; she bursts out laughing. "You couldn't keep her away from me when we were trying to kill each other. No offense," she adds hastily, seeing Glimmer's fear and uncertainty starting to wobble confusedly towards outrage.

Adora, the incredible idiot, says, "It's just your animal magnetism."

"No match for your punch-me-in-the-face magnetism."

Glimmer's just trying to keep up. "Hang on. Let me get this straight. You're dating Adora…"

"For some reason," Catra says, grinning at Adora's stupid grin.

"…and you don't mind if I do, too?"

Catra starts to say something witty, then sees the way one of Glimmer's hands wrings her cape while the other rests on her knee, hastily pulled away from Adora's hand; sees something in her eyes that Catra's seen in her own reflection a thousand times and always turned away from, terrified, until she'd been trapped under the earth with Adora and death and no other choice.

It's only a little bit less terrifying on Glimmer's face than it was on her own. The threat of loss in that tenderness, the pain in that vulnerability, still cuts her to the bone if she lets herself think about it. But she's braver now. And Glimmer, who didn't waste years and nearly kill them all by fighting the love she feels, is braver still. 

And now Glimmer's heart is in Adora's hands, and her happiness -- through some bizarre and completely unearned quirk of fate -- is, for this moment, in Catra's.

Catra pads across the cave and drapes herself in her usual spot across Adora's lap, which lets her conveniently rest her muddy feet in Glimmer's lap and her tail in a friendly curl over Glimmer's arm. "I already knew you loved Adora. She obviously loves you, she stayed on your side. No one gets their butt kicked that many times just for the moral high ground or whatever. And -- I mean, we're all going to be together for a long time, right? So I don't see how this changes anything."

"Catra --" Glimmer seizes both her hands. Catra's breath catches as the entire passionate flare of Glimmer's courage and gratitude is focused on her. Her hands are hot with a tingling rush that can't possibly be magic, and for a second she thinks Glimmer might --

Adora engulfs them both in a gigantic hug. "I love you," she sighs. "Both of you."

"Adora," Glimmer says, soft and helpless and yearning, and kisses her again. 

"Oh wow, you like her _that_ much? That's embarassing," Catra observes when they come up for air.

The grin Glimmer flashes her is so sly she can't help grinning back. "Hey, you started it."

Catra makes a show of examining her perfectly polished claws. "Well, I can’t deny that I always have had excellent taste."

A snap and distant shout distract them all at the same moment. "Bow," Glimmer says suddenly. "Bow's going to freak out. Is he gonna freak out? He will, right? This is -- kind of a big thing to just spring on him."

Catra's ears perk up. "Ooh, can I tell him?"

"No!" Glimmer yelps. 

"Don't you dare," Adora warns.

Catra grumbles in disappointment, but snuggles a little deeper into Adora's lap. "Well clearly you two are going to be no fun at all."


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I was 90% finished with what I thought would be Chapter 2, when this chapter demanded to be written first. The chapter formerly known as Chapter 2 will be along shortly, with a *lot* more fluff.

**waiting impatiently**

Glimmer knows the palace better than anyone, and she's got it all figured out. The south tower gives the best line of sight down the valley; from there it's a straight jump, about four hundred feet of dizzying drop, to the Moonstone's pedestal, where she can see over the canopy of the Whispering Woods almost to Salineas. Then the gabled library roof for the northern approach, and finally -- more as a formality, really -- Darla’s official landing-pad, a stubby gray metal thing like a crooked coat-rack, surrounded by huge scorch marks, in the middle of an unused pasture.

She can teleport through the whole circuit in about thirty seconds. Which is still long enough for Bow to notice she's gone.

Usually she would distract him by sending him down to the kitchen for snacks, but she's the Queen and he's her Master (Archer) of Ceremonies and Chief Advisor. They have palace staff bringing them as many snacks as they could want all day long. She can't think of any other good distractions for the same reason. Any emergency dire enough to drag _him_ out a day of royal paperwork in the Queen's study would probably require her presence, too.

She does convince him to take a stroll and stretch his legs around midmorning, when both their hands are starting to cramp from signing ten million petitions and she's ready to burst out of her skin. As soon as the study door closes behind him she makes the leap: south tower -- Moonstone -- library -- launchpad -- back to the study. Where Bow's standing in the doorway, arms crossed, frowning at her.

"Oh, come on! I was gone _less than a minute_!"

He's not really angry, just exasperated -- he's been chasing after her with these stacks of scrolls for weeks, and they actually probably have gotten more done this morning than they have in all that time. "That's not the point. You promised me you'd stay until we finished this. I know you're worried about Adora and Catra --"

"They could be back any second! How do you expect me to concentrate on --" she pulls a petition out of the stack at random -- "pigeon property rights? What does that even _mean_?"

"I know you're worried," he repeats, infinitely patient. She loves him for it, loves him beyond all telling, and only wants to throttle him a little bit. "But they won't be back any second. The orbital reentry window is still an hour away. And they'd have signaled Entrapta if they were in trouble."

"What if they're in too much trouble to signal?" She has the disaster very clear in her mind; Darla reduced to a smoking comet streaking in for a crash landing. She could probably teleport onto something falling that fast, get them out before they hit, but only if she has enough warning. Only if she sees it coming.

The creeping fear grips her by the throat; it's either teleport or scream. She flickers through the circuit again. Nothing but clear blue skies, deceptively tranquil, like an ocean that shows no trace of whether it's swallowed a shipwreck.

This time when she comes back Bow grips her shoulders in both hands, his expression sliding from annoyance to alarm. "They're good at missions, they're fine! You have _got_ to calm down."

"Easy for you to say! It was bad enough when you and Adora were running off on missions without me, at least you were on the same planet! They're in _space_! It's full of aliens, and Prime's ships, and --" she's too upset to come up with a third thing, so she hugs Bow instead, trying to ground herself in his concerned calm. "I feel like it's very reasonable to be worried about this! Why aren't you worried?"

Bow doesn’t laugh at her, at least. (She loves him.) He just rests his chin on the top of her head. "Because I was there on Beast Island. And then afterwards, when Horde Prime took you. Seeing Adora then -- believe me, there is nothing in this universe or any other that will keep her from coming back to you."

"Okay, that… actually helps a lot." Glimmer wipes her eyes with the hem of her cape and collapses back into her ornate chair, pulling the next stack of petitions closer. "You're right, I have to focus. Let's get this done."

For about ten minutes the restful silence is broken only by the scratching of their official quills. The ten minutes after that are a lot less restful, and a lot more fidgety.

"Every half hour," Bow says at last. "We'll both go. But that's it, okay?"

Glimmer tears her attention from the sky outside the window to glance back at him. "Unless we hear screaming."

Bow rolls his eyes. "Obviously."

Glimmer grins and sticks a hand out over the table. "Deal."

**while driving**

It's actually the least dangerous mission that Catra could possibly have imagined -- take Darla out to some dust cloud, measure some stuff, turn around and go back. Glimmer probably picked it out on purpose for Catra and Adora’s first solo mission, just so they wouldn't get to do anything fun or interesting without her. They don't even run into any suspicious distress beacons or anything.

It would be boring, except -- well, there's Adora.

It’s not like they haven’t had plenty of time together, just the two of them, since Horde Prime. They've spent long, lazy afternoons in the orchards and little hidden gardens in the palace at Bright Moon. Adora's taught Catra all about _picnic,_ up by the waterfall and even in the tamer parts of the Whispering Woods. Even in the palace itself, Bow and Glimmer and the others have been good (weirdly good) about giving them space. They grew up in a crowded barracks where everything was everyone’s business and privacy was a luxury for Princesses. It’s not like having people around bothers them.

But that's just it -- they've been _given_ space. Every little solitude was bordered by the noise and obligations that were waiting to interrupt it. Now, with Darla to themselves for three whole days, they have space that no one gave, that no one can take back, that is wholly theirs and closed to everyone else in the universe.

The knowledge that no one can come knock discreetly at the door or ping their tracker pads, that no friends can call them down to dinner in the courtyard and away from their shared little hollow of safety, is making Catra a little drunk with happiness. She's been sitting in the same boneless position on the floor of the control room, watching Adora fiddle with dials, for more than an hour now. They spent the hour before that making out. Adora's tongue is poking out of the side of her mouth as she concentrates, and her ponytail is an absolute mess.

Adora twists one last triumphant dial and smiles at her. Catra fights to keep from purring, just on principle. She's not _that_ loose and brainless yet.

Adora’s saying, "You know, this is kind of like our honeymoon! It's something Sea Hawk told me about, when two people who just got married go on an adventure. I guess to find honey." She frowns, thoughtful, then brightens. "I wonder if some day we'll find a whole moon made of honey."

"What's honey?"

There follows a brief interlude in which they that discover there's no honey in the ship's stores, but there is strawberry jelly, which is almost as good.

When she's finished daintily licking the sticky, almost sickening sweetness of it off her claws, Catra asks, "What's married?"

"Permanent dating," Adora says casually. Like that’s even a thing you can say casually.

Catra catches her by surprise and pins her up against a bulkhead. She tastes like that red sticky sweetness; then Adora drops the uncapped jar, and Catra has to leap aside to avoid getting splattered. Adora comes after her, laughing, hands all gummed up with jelly. She leaps onto the back of the captain's chair, hissing, but then Adora gets too close and Catra somersaults over her head, incapacitates her with ten seconds of tickling in the sensitive spot below her ribs, and pins her again, this time with her hands up safely out of the way and Catra's tail around the back of her knee to pull her off balance again if she tries anything clever.

She won't try anything. She's got that stupid moonstruck grin on her face that makes Catra feel like nothing bad will ever happen to either of them again. She dips her head and kisses the side of Adora's neck, afraid that if she looks at it too long her heart will melt away like ice in the sunlight and she'll die on the spot.

Adora's not afraid of anything. "Someday I'll beat you."

"You idiot," Catra says into her collarbone, "it was never about _winning_ ," and tries to tell Adora with makeouts (and eventually -- embarrassingly -- purring) what she's been waiting to be able to say for the last fifteen years.

They end up so distracted they forget to signal their reentry into Etheria’s atmosphere, which turns their controlled descent into a near-crash that smashes three fences into kindling and nearly frightens the Royal Gardener into an early grave. But it's alright. Glimmer forgives them eventually.

**a flash of anger**

On their next mission they lose Adora, and it's Catra's fault. 

She was supposed to be on watch -- she _was_ on watch, staring into gray rocks looming out of gray fog, bored to the point of comatose near-death. Until she heard something clatter in the mist; metal on stone. She slipped away, not even out of sight, between a pair of basalt pillars jutting up out of the dead earth like fangs, and found footprints and a knife. When she went back to tell the others she found Bow and Glimmer asleep where she'd left them, and only a shallow scrape in the pebbly sand where Adora had been. 

That was two days ago.

She's still alive; Bow keeps catching blips from her tracker pad, somewhere deep under the planet's surface. But the planet's surface is a few inches of pebbly sand, then a foot of sandy pebbles, then solid rock. Everywhere. There's no caves or fissures, no tunnels, no way to get to her. "There must be a way," Bow keeps saying, and he's right, but if he says it one more time Catra might disembowel him, so she follows Glimmer on patrol instead.

She calls it patrolling, but she’s just wandering at random through gigantic piles of boulders, whacking them with her staff like she thinks one of them might split into a secret door. Every time Catra makes a snide comment about how likely _that_ is to work, she whacks them harder.

Bow is grim and determined, ragged and sleepless like they all are, but Glimmer’s _angry_. It’s almost a relief. 

Weeks later, when they’re back on Etheria, all well and safe, Catra will be able to sit with Perfuma in a dappled glade and come back to this moment, to trace each individual step of the descent; but she’s not thinking clearly now. She’s not thinking at all, she’s too nauseous with terror and hatred, overwhelmed by visions of Adora chained and beaten, because she can’t stand thinking about the worse things that could be happening to her. 

Catra’s been playing this game since she was four years old, and she played it against Shadow Weaver. Glimmer’s easy. Catra can needle Glimmer almost without thinking, pushing her, then drawing back and letting her simmer herself a little closer to an explosion. After barely twenty minutes Glimmer’s weariness and fear break to fury. She whirls and flings her staff like a javelin into a huge cliff face where it sticks, quivering. "Will you just _stop!_ "

The ravine echoes her: _stop stop stop stop stop_

Catra leaps down from the crest she was climbing and leans against a dolmen. Lounges against it, deliberately, all insolence and scorn. "Stop what, Sparkles?"

"You know what! Stop being so -- "

"So _what_?" Catra snarls. "So _me_? Such a _fuckup?_ Such a _nuisance_?"

"Stop it," Glimmer says, in a totally different voice. Her hands fall empty at her sides, and she almost takes a step back, horrified, as the last piece falls into place. "You're making me mad on purpose. Are you -- trying to make me yell at you?"

"As if you'd need any help."

"Catra!" Again the echoes: _ra ra ra ra ra_.

Catra tries to turn away, but Glimmer marches over and grabs her by the shoulders, almost like she’s going to shake her -- but then her hands are framing Catra’s face, her fingertips just reaching the base of Catra’s ears. Her touch is gentle, her anger banked to embers but not extinguished. "I mean it. _Stop_. It won’t work."

Catra deflates, more bewildered and hurt by that than any insult Glimmer could have thrown back at her. "But -- I lost Adora."

Understanding dawns in Glimmer’s eyes. "And you're mad at yourself. Believe me, I'm super mad at you too. But we'll get her back. Stop trying to make me hate you. _You can't._ "

"How do you know?" Catra blurts out.

“Oh, I know. I am _way_ more stubborn than you are.”

Catra, utterly unbalanced, can’t think to do anything but scoff. “That’s not -- that doesn’t even make --”

"You think I'm joking? You don’t know me as well as you think you do. You'll see." Glimmer lets Catra go, picks up her staff and jabs it savagely into the dirt a few times, just to see if some kind of tunnel opens up, then starts off down the ravine again. "Help or go back to camp!"

 _Amp amp amp amp_.

Catra closes her mouth and scrubs her cheek with the back of her hand. There's still a warm flush there from Glimmer's hands, a tingling like magic. But Glimmer doesn't have any magic, not on a dead planet.

There she goes, striding off into the fog like the avenging monarch she is; cape billowing out behind her in the dead air, hair frizzing with humidity and rage as she walks straight into a maze of mist and rocks, with no visibility, with no magic, ready to get herself killed in some completely idiotic way.

Catra follows her. _Someone_ has to.

Fifteen minutes later, they turn a corner and find a gigantic stone archway, and in its mouth a set of stairs leading down.

**an abandoned, empty place**

At the bottom of the stairs, they find Adora.

They also find a gigantic cavern, carved with such fluid grace that the stone walls seem like the draped tapestries of an ancient throne room, lit by some kind of creepy First Ones artifact balanced on top of a pillar. But Catra barely notices any of that, because on her knees in front of the pillar is Adora.

Her jacket, even grimy with stone-dust, is red as a wound. Catra tackles her and rips it open, looking for blood, then presses her forehead to Adora's, desperate to feel her warmth, her breath. "Are you okay? Are you hurt?"

"I'm fine," Adora says, in a voice as dusty as the rest of her. Catra yelps as Glimmer pulls her off by the back of the jacket and hugs Adora herself.

"Are you sure?"

"Yeah," Adora says, laughing a little, then buries her face in Glimmer's shoulder and sniffles.

Horrified, Catra presses against her, trying to push her way back into the hug by main force. "Are you _crying_?"

"You'd cry too if you were trapped in a cave for two days!" Glimmer snaps.

"No, I would _not_ \--"

"Adora," Bow says quietly. Something in his voice cuts across their squabbling, makes Adora look up. "What's this? What is this place?"

Satisfied that Adora’s in good hands, he's gone to examine the pillar in the center of the room. Only it’s not a pillar, it’s too rough and gnarled; it's a huge stalagmite, the size of a century-old tree, with a glass pyramid balanced point-down on its tip. The inside of the pyramid is full of light, but it's not a steady light -- not, Catra finds herself thinking, a healthy light. Sharp lines of white brilliance move inside it at right angles, looking like charges on the wiring of a First Ones datachip, but they don't connect. Their patterns fall into chaos, stutter and fade, then start up again, repeating their broken dance forever without end. Looking at it is starting to give her a headache. 

There are runes etched around the stalagmite, slick and black. Bow trails his fingers over them, then scans them with his pad. "Can you read these?"

"Kind of." Adora pries herself away from Catra and Glimmer. "I mean, I can read them, but I don't understand most of it. It's all technical stuff. I tried, but --"

"Tried to do what?" Glimmer asks.

Catra demands, "Adora, what _happened_ to you?"

"Tried to fix it," Adora answers. "They brought me down here and asked me to."

Catra turns. There are things moving in the shadows, smallish and lumpy and converging on them from all sides. They were almost invisible while they were still, since their bodies seem to be made of the same flat gray stone as the walls. As they move, though, the light gleams on the flat discs of quartz studded all over them like eyes. Their legs are stubby and weirdly jointed. There must be hundreds of them.

Instinctively Catra presses back towards Adora, staying between her and the little monsters. "What are those things?"

"Not things," Bow says quietly. "People."

Catra's ears flatten in chagrin, but not for long. "They kidnapped Adora."

"I don't think they can talk," Adora says. "They can control the earth, though -- they opened a tunnel to bring me down. They knew who I was, and they wanted me to fix this. I think it's their planet's Heart, and it stole their magic like it did on Etheria, but the magic wasn’t returned when it broke. It was -- lost, somehow."

Glimmer looks up at the pyramid now, her face flat and pale in its unflinching light. "Maybe it was a weapon, and they used it."

"Who cares? Just fix it already, and we can get out of here." One of the rock-goblins is creeping closer. It's not very fast, but Catra has to squash the urge to kick it -- she'd probably break her toes. It blinks three of its quartz eyes at her.

"I can't." Adora's voice, brittle with exhaustion, finally breaks. Catra glances back in alarm. Adora's half-falling, leaning on Glimmer, her eyes squeezed shut, but not enough to stop the tears leaking down. "I tried. I tried everything, but nothing works."

"Then you did what they wanted. Now _let's go,_ " Catra snaps.

Bow's found some way to plug his pad into the thing and is poking at the screen, brow furrowed. "It's definitely a First Ones artifact, but I can't get anything from it, it's all just fragments. Entrapta's translation program isn't even working. The base code's been shredded."

"There you go." Catra backs up, gets both hands around the arm not claimed by Glimmer, and pulls. She might as well be pulling the stalagmite. "Come on, Adora!"

"I can't," she says again. Her voice is steadier this time, with a hint of steel in it. Catra's stomach sinks. "They need me to heal their planet. I can't just abandon them."

"You're exhausted," Glimmer points out. "You haven't eaten in two days --"

"They brought me fruit!"

Catra and Glimmer share a look of perfect understanding.

"Adora," Catra says, "you tried. You’re done. Maybe this thing is just too old and too broken to be fixed. You can’t heal everything." 

Glimmer adds, "You said the writing is technical stuff, right? We'll bring it to Entrapta, she can help you work it out! Then we can come back!"

Adora's pulled away from Glimmer to stand on her own, but she's so tired she’s swaying on her feet. It makes Catra want to scream. "You've got five seconds to say yes, or Sparkles and I will hold you down while Bow ties you up, and we'll _drag_ you back."

Adora frowns at her. While she's busy thinking of an answer to that, Bow says, "They did let us down here to get you. Maybe they know you've done everything you can."

"Three seconds," Catra says.

Adora gives in. Watching the fight go out of her is like watching the ground crumble out from beneath your feet, and Catra hates it, but she hates the hollow look in Adora’s eyes even more. The rock-goblins watch them herd Adora back towards the stairs, but don’t try to stop them. “I’m sorry,” Adora tells them. “I’ll come back for you. I promise.“ If they can understand her, they don’t react. 

The stairs are hard going. Adora's more drained than not-sleeping in a creepy cave for two days should account for. Catra can picture her exhausting herself, pouring every drop of She-Ra's magic into that crumbling ancient piece of garbage,because she'd rather spend herself down to the last drop of will and power than risk making a bunch of rock-goblins a little sad. If Catra works at it, she can pretend her chest only hurts from the exhaustion of climbing.

They end up with Catra supporting Adora on one side and Bow on the other, while Glimmer takes the lead, lighting their way with the glow-circuits Bow built into her staff. Her cape flutters with every step, almost brushing Adora’s nose, until Adora reaches out and wraps her hand in it. Another support to keep them from falling. Glimmer smiles over her shoulder, but there’s a strain to it. Catra thinks bitterly of the horror on Glimmer’s face up in the ravine. She’s right to be horrified, even after all this time, seeing all the little ways the Horde taught them to destroy themselves. 

The pink light of Glimmer’s staff pales, washes out into the gray light pouring through from above. Darla’s waiting for them, called to Bow’s tracker signal, the only smooth silhouette in a jagged plain of broken rocks. Adora struggles upright. “Bow, give me your pad, I’ll send the data to Entrapta so she can start --”

Catra recaptures Adora’s arm and hauls her forward. “No. These people have waited a million years, they can wait until you’ve slept. And showered.”

“Everyone’s going to bed,” Bow announces. “Captain’s orders.”

Catra flicks her tail in irritation at having to wait for the gangplank to roll down. “Hang on, who made you captain?”

Bow looks up from the controls, frowning. “Oh man, you’re right. Sorry about that, got a little ahead of myself.” He clears his throat. “I hereby nominate myself acting captain of Darla, since Adora and I are the only ones who know how to fly her.”

“Point ‘f order,” Adora mumbles. “Can’t nom’nate yourself. I nom’nate you.”

“Seconded,” Glimmer declares. “With Royal favor. The motion carries. Bow?”

“By Royal decree with Council approval, _regina ex situ_ , uh, _in absentia_ , so let it be the law of the land.”

He and Glimmer are grinning at each other. Catra wrinkles her nose. “Is this what you three do in those meetings you go to all the time?”

“Pretty much.” Bow trails them up the gangplank, reels it in and shuts the hatch behind them. Even the featureless metal of the airlock is a relief after all that grit and stone. “Darla, launch sequence to stable orbit, please.”

They split up at the first corridor, Catra steering Adora towards their bunk while Bow and Glimmer head for the galley. Glimmer pauses at the junction, lifts up onto her toes to kiss Adora, then looks at Catra with an unsettlingly intense emotion that she can't identify. "Listen, Sparkles," Catra starts to say, because most of the time when people look at her with that kind of expectant focus it's because they want her to apologize.

Glimmer shakes her head, reaches for Catra's free hand and holds it in both of hers. "Don't worry about it. Get some rest, both of you."

Catra's ears, sharper than most, catch Bow's whisper as they round the corner out of sight: "Sooo, want to tell me what's going on with you two?"

She's had people thrown off cliffs for less. But that was a long time ago. She's surprised to realize that she doesn't mind them trying to figure it out; maybe, if they do, they can tell her.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Glimmer vs unconsciousness; Catra vs Council meetings; Catra vs Glimmer.

**a deafening sound**

Six months of Entrapta’s personal attention have transformed Darla from a bundle of rusting gears, held together by destiny and dangerous isotopes, into a _real_ ship -- practically a home. There’s a training simulator now, with all kinds of fancy First Ones-enhanced force fields and gravity settings. There’s a garden. There’s a fully-stocked galley, where little robot squirrels in white aprons and tall hats serve tiny cupcakes every hour, whether anyone asked for tiny cupcakes or not. All the bunks are personally decorated; Glimmer’s has a thick lavender carpet (equipped with a little robot that vacuums and picks up rumpled clothes), and a few little clusters of crystals hanging from the ceiling, and a gilt-edged mirror concealing a screen that can show the ship’s course or the stars outside. It’s perfect. It’s nothing like Horde Prime’s cold, sterile flagship. There’s even a hammock instead of a bed, so Glimmer can drift off in the familiar comfort of gentle motion, like she used to in Bright Moon, where the summer breeze from the open window rocked her to sleep.

Except she can’t sleep. The room and the ship are as perfect as Entrapta’s exacting sense of detail could make them, but crystals and carpet don’t do anything to stop the humming in the walls. It _never_ stops. 

“It’s just the engines,” Bow told her cheerfully when she asked him if it would ever stop. She can ignore it during strategy meetings on the bridge under the shine of distant galaxies, or when she’s sprawled out with Bow in the galley eating tiny cupcakes. She can’t ignore it at night, ship’s night, when everyone’s asleep, when there’s nothing but silence and that high, cold, white sound -- in the walls, in the floor, in her hands and feet and, eventually, in her bones. The humming and the emptiness. There’s no magic in space (“not _yet_ ”, Adora said yesterday, so blithe and confident that Glimmer kissed her), and its absence is another thing that she can sometimes sort-of ignore. But it leaves a gasping numbness, like she’s always just had the wind knocked out of her. And into that airless space creeps that relentless humming, insidious, taunting her, _changing_ her.

Darkness explodes into a flat white plane of light. Glimmer flinches back from it, shaking and shaken, fists and teeth clenched, ready to show them at least that they haven’t broken her, that she will _never_ \--

But the eyes peering down at her are blue and yellow, not dead green. Catra, leaning against the door to the corridor. The _open_ door; because Glimmer’s free to come and go as she pleases, of course. Not trapped. 

Not trapped in her room, anyway. Still trapped in a flimsy metal contraption she can’t control hurtling at impossible speeds through an endless void of instant death.

Catra’s as poised and cool-looking as usual, but it all breaks down when she speaks -- a little awkward, hesitant. Nervous almost. “Hey, Glimmer.”

Glimmer struggles out of her hammock, glad to be on her feet, to fall into the rush of action. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing life-threatening, if that’s what you’re thinking. I didn’t wake you up, did I.” It isn’t a question. Backlit and unseen, Catra’s sharp gaze has already taken in the tangled blankets, the pad with its star-map upturned on the floor, the dent in the wall already dimpling back into shape. 

Glimmer shrugs. “I couldn’t sleep.”

“Melog said someone was clogging up the ship with _awful_ energy. Like -- it’s hard to explain, but the feelings version of rotten fish. And I doubt it was Arrow Boy, he’s been over the moon since we found that weird satellite.”

Catra’s clumsy attempts to ask what’s wrong fill Glimmer with a hot rush of shame. Catra was trapped on Horde Prime’s ship too, and she was chipped and almost killed -- but _she_ isn’t keeping anyone else awake with her toxic psychic energy. Or throwing data pads at the walls because a flare from the engine cast a white reflection that looked for half a second like a face. 

“It’s always the hallways for me,” Catra says, looking down at her claws. “They were all the same. I used to just wander for days looking for anything different. One time I slept in the rafters and a _brother_ had to come lead me back to the bridge. I keep waking up thinking Adora’s going to shove me into a pit of green slime.” She looks up, and somehow even with the light behind her, her faint smile flashes in the gloom. “She’s worried sick about you, you know. It’s getting kind of old to listen to.” The words are right, sharp, but her tone is new: soft, almost gentle.

Shame, pride and anger melt like snowflakes. “Did she… send you? To check on me?”

“Pfft. As if she could.” Catra hesitates, tail twitching, then steels herself and holds out a hand. “Come on, Sparkles. I can help.”

They’ve come a long way. Glimmer takes Catra’s hand, lets herself be led past the training room and the garden bubble to another bunk. Catra sweeps in without knocking, and before Glimmer’s eyes adjust she’s deposited onto a hard, wide bed. Adora’s already there, warm and golden in the half-dark. “There you are,” she says, relieved, and puts an arm around Glimmer, something she hardly ever used to do when they shared a bed back in Bright Moon. Of course, Adora never kissed her back in Bright Moon, either, but she does now, soft and half-asleep. It’s the closest thing to magic that Glimmer’s felt since they left Etheria.

Catra climbs in behind her, all sharp angles, startling enough that Glimmer’s distracted from kissing Adora. A weight shifts on her legs as Melog stretches out at the foot of the bed, completely encircling her. 

It’s much nicer than being suspended in pitch black and silence in her own bunk, alone. But that high whine is still filtering in, buzzing in the legs of the bedframe where they meet the floor, putting her teeth on edge. 

“I’ll keep you both awake,” she warns, clinging to Adora like she’s the only solid rock in the spinning void of the universe. “I can’t sleep out here. It’s the engine noise.”

Catra shifts cautiously closer, like she’s afraid at any second that Glimmer might...what? Yell at her? Disappear? 

Glimmer almost asks, but then that brief hesitation is over and Catra settles half-propped up against the curve of the wall, leaning against Glimmer’s back, one arm reaching along the pillows so she can tease the end of Adora’s ponytail with the tips of her claws. Encircling Glimmer, but not quite touching her.

“I know,” she says. “I hear it, too. Listen, Sparkles, if you tell anyone about this, I’ll --” she stops, searching.

“You’ll what?”

“Never mind,” she sighs. “Adora --”

“Got you,” Adora says with sleepy confidence, and leans over to kiss Catra on the nose.

Before Adora’s finished settling back into the blankets (murmuring “boop” to herself with immense satisfaction), a low purr builds in Catra’s chest. A warm living thrum, rising and falling with her breath, engulfing all other sound. 

_Oh_ , Glimmer thinks, _that’s new_ , but by then the long exhaustion of the journey and the deep, slow waves of Catra’s purring, like the waves on the shore of the lake back home, are already carrying her off to a peaceful place, dark and quiet, without dreams.

**a fistfight**

Things have definitely been kind of weird and tense lately, Adora’s the first to admit it. Glimmer's been really stressed; her dad can help with a lot of the day-to-day work of running the kingdom, and Adora’s good at things like supply routes, but there are apparently also a ton of ancient mystical sacred things that the Queen is responsible for. The lamp and the monster at Glimmer’s coronation were only the beginning. 

All Adora knows is that Glimmer's been on a shorter fuse than usual lately, which makes her an even easier and more tempting target for Catra, who's just… being Catra. Adora's done her best to investigate without prying, and as far as she can tell there's no particular crushing guilt or old wound from their war-torn past that's making Catra work twice as hard to drive Glimmer crazy. Catra's still talking to Perfuma once or twice a week about feelings -- and when Adora finally asked her, Perfuma just smiled and said they were doing really fantastic work unblocking spiritual energy flows. Melog's been hiding under beds a lot, but still purrs when the sunlight hits her just right. Last night at dinner Catra not-so-subtly instigated a fight that ended when Glimmer threw her soup out the garden window and teleported to an unused room to yell into a magically sound-deadening pillow for an hour. Adora hasn't gotten a good night's sleep in weeks.

So she'd been the first one to jump at any suggestion that might get her girlfriends to work out their differences. But this is starting to feel like it might be a terrible idea.

"Bow," she hisses. He looks up at her from the dirt floor of the ruined house they turned into a makeshift arena. He was chosen unanimously as referee; Adora was disqualified, and he’s the only other person in Bright Moon who can be trusted not to call in Glimmer's favor just to annoy Catra. "Do you think this is a terrible idea?"

"No," Bow says uncertainly. "We trust them, right? To control their emotions? And to play…fair… okay, you know what, maybe, but Glimmer keeps waking me up at two in the morning to complain about Catra's stupid hair, and it's kind of getting old."

"I have to live with Catra's stupid hair," Adora mutters. "Why couldn't they just talk about whatever's bothering them? It's not like I haven't asked a million times!"

"All forms of communication are valid," Perfuma says serenely, stepping out of a tangle of gigantic vines as though from a gilded carriage.

Adora yelps. "What are you doing here?"

"The whole village is talking about it!" Frosta ice-slides down a crumbling wall to the seat on Adora's other side. "Glimmer and Catra in a death-match? It's so cool!"

"It is _not_ a death-match!"

Bow frowns sternly at Frosta. "Everyone here loves and cares about each other very much. This is just a friendly sparring competition."

Perfuma raises a spindly vine out of the dirt and starts popping blackberries into her mouth. "Battle can be extremely cathartic for pent-up negative emotions! Don't worry, Adora. Catra's come such a long way since the war, I'm positive she doesn't want to kill any of us anymore!"

Adora puts her head in her hands. "This is a terrible idea. Bow --"

"Too late," Bow sighs. With an unerring instinct for the dramatic, Glimmer poofs into the arena's western end just as Catra saunters in from the east. They eye each other as they pace towards the center and clasp hands, standing poised like the first step in a dance. At least they're both smiling.

Bow jogs forward with the equipment he was up all night making for them; a simple wooden staff and bandolier of harmless powder-bombs for Glimmer, gauntlets for Catra that will coat her fingertips in blue paint. "Okay, ground rules. No improvised or non-sanctioned weapons. No biting, and no dark magic. I want to see a good clean spar. Okay?" 

Nods from both combatants. 

"On my mark," Bow says, backing up to give them space. In a flicker of motion he nocks and fires an arrow that bursts into confetti over the center ground. "Go!"

Catra pounces, but Glimmer's not there. Catra staggers -- but the pounce was a feint, she turns the stagger into a nimble sideways leap and catches the staff driving at the back of her head. "Nice try, Sparkles! But that trick only works on Adora."

Glimmers blinks out again, but Catra doesn't wait to see where she reappears; she's already moving, flowing halfway up a shattered post, leaping from there to a half-smashed wall. Glimmer reappears, swinging the staff through the space where she'd been two seconds ago; too late. Glimmer grits her teeth, pushes herself, flickering almost too fast to follow, but no one gets the edge over Catra in speed. Every time Glimmer teleports she's blind for half a second, and that's enough for Catra to be somewhere else. It's brilliant, and it works; Glimmer's frustration boils over and she goes for a broadside swing, yelling. Catra dodges easily, leaping lightly onto Glimmer's staff like it’s an iron support beam.

She started using that move on Adora when they were eight, when she weighed barely more than an angry scarecrow and Adora had already been bench-pressing her for a year or two; Glimmer, caught off guard and never having bench-pressed her best friend, yelps and drops the staff. A smoke-bomb interrupts Catra's leap, and they both break away coughing, Catra with "magic" streaking her clothes and skin all down her left side, Glimmer with blue-paint claw marks down her cheek.

Frosta boos. "Punch her in the face, Glimmer!"

No, Adora thinks, now there'll be a pause, a beat as Catra falls back, reassesses, looks for new places in Glimmer's armor where she can pry in her claws, maybe another circling feint --

Glimmer roars, bulls forward and punches Catra in the face.

Only a little bit -- Catra shrieks and ducks aside, and Glimmer's fist just clips her ear -- but that puts her on the defensive, leaping to avoid more smoke-bombs. She gets her feet against a wall and launches back at Glimmer, claws outstretched, and then they're on the ground, rolling and yelling and -- "Hey! _No biting_!" Bow yells. Only they're not biting, they're --

"Are they _kissing_?" Frosta is equal parts disappointed and horrified. Adora’s jaw drops open.

"Oh," Bow says in a strangled voice. "Well, that's, uh -- technically not against the rules."

"See?" Perfuma says brightly. "Sometimes non-verbal communication is really the best way to bring barriers down!"

Catra and Glimmer break apart, both flushed and breathing hard. Catra has Glimmer pinned down in the dust. Slowly, she runs two fingers down Glimmer's unmarked cheek, drawing a matching set of blue lines with painful gentleness. "Well, Princess? Is this over yet?"

Glimmer vanishes. Catra starts to fall, then keeps falling as Glimmer pins her down facefirst, arms behind her back, tail thrashing as she gets a mouthful of dirt. "Nice try, Horde scum," Glimmer says, light and laughing, "but that trick only works on Adora."

"Hey," Adora says weakly.

Glimmer's face is still beet red under the paint, but her voice rings out like a golden bell. "Now yield with honor!"

"Ugh, _fine_ , get off me already," Catra growls.

Glimmer releases her prisoner and allows herself to be swept away by her adoring fans -- which is to say, Bow and Frosta pull her aside to express surprise and disappointment respectively, none of which tarnishes her grin for a second. Adora jumps down and goes to sit next to Catra, who's busy brushing dirt and soot out of her fur.

"You’ve been flirting with her this whole time,” she says. “I can’t believe I didn’t see it.”

“Well, it took you like ten years to figure out I was flirting with _you_. So this is actually a huge improvement.” Catra pats Adora’s shoulder, still without taking her eyes off Glimmer.

“You’re terrible at flirting! Couldn't you have just _asked_ to kiss her?"

"This way was more fun." Catra grins up at her, ears pricked up, tail lashing in extreme self-satisfaction. "Can we keep her?"

"You’re the worst. Both of you," Adora says, but she can feel where her arm presses against Catra’s that she’s trying not to purr, and Adora’s own insides feel floaty in a way that suggests an extremely localized loss of gravity. She's smiling so hard her face hurts; Catra grabs her and kisses her, probably to hide that she is, too.

Glimmer disentagles herself from Frosta, and even from Bow, crossing back to them with her own goofy matching grin. "Come on, we need to celebrate my glorious victory," she declares. She holds out a hand to each of them, and they take it, letting her whisk them away into whatever’s coming next. 

**a missed call**

"Glimmer!" Bow hisses into his pad. "Where are you? The Council meeting started ten minutes ago!"

A panel opens on the back of the pad. A three-fingered hand made of stiff wire unfolds from its tiny compartment, types his message onto the screen, gives him a thumbs up, and refolds itself. Entrapta thinks her new auditory-to-heiroglyphic converter is the way of the future. It's definitely the way of Bow's future, because she installed it on his pad while he was sleeping last week and he can't figure out how to turn it off.

But maybe it's for the best. At least this time Glimmer answers, unlike the last twenty times he tried to reach her.

> [ **Glimmer:** sorry. cant make it]

"What do you mean you can't make it? It's your Council! You're the Queen! I'm trying to stall, but General Hollyhock won't wait much longer, it's her wife’s birthday and the transport leaves today --"

> [ **Glimmer:** did u try snacks]

"Of course I did! We’re out of snacks and the cake won’t be out of the oven for another hour!"

> [ **Glimmer:** can u and dad do the meetng]  
> [ **Glimmer:** ?]

Bow sighs and slides down the wall in the little alcove between a pair of rearing unicorn statues. It’s a good hiding spot, just down the hall from the Council chamber but shielded from view by marble hooves. "Yeah, I guess. Is everything okay? I thought you were excited about the airship tower proposal."

This time the little dots waver on the screen for at least a minute.

> [ **Glimmer:** I am!]  
> [ **Glimmer:** im really sorry]  
> [ **Glimmer:** but im trapped]

"Trapped?" Bow leaps to his feet again. "Are you all right? Where are you? I'll get Adora --"

> [ **Glimmer:** im fine!]  
> [ **Glimmer:** adora's here]

"You're both trapped? Trapped where? Can you teleport out?"

> [ **Glimmer:** ….]  
> [ **Glimmer:** …]

It can't be that dire an emergency, Bow reasons, or she would have called him before now. Right? Or at least _led_ with the fact that she was tied up somewhere. Or locked in? She couldn't be texting him if she was tied up. And if whoever has her got Adora, too...

Another ping diverts him.

> [ **Adora:** STAND BY. ATTEMPTING EXTRACTION]

Well, that's...comforting. Probably. Except not actually physically comforting; he's getting a headache. "Why are you typing like that?"

> [ **Adora:** LIKE WHAT]

"Never mind. Just -- what are you trying to extract Glimmer from?"

> [ **Glimmer:** hang on]  
> [ **Glimmer:** ill show u]

The next ping is a request to download a file. A single image, blurry and at an awkward angle: Glimmer stretched out on the couch in her study, completely pinned by Catra, who's curled on her side with her head resting in the hollow of Glimmer’s shoulder, tail a little curlicue in a beam of afternoon sun. Even with her face half-hidden in Glimmer’s hair, Bow can see that her mouth is open, clearly snoring. Probably adorable tiny kitten snores.

It's the cutest thing Bow's ever seen in his life. He squeals and doesn't even care that they can probably hear him in the Council chamber. 

> [ **Glimmer:** melog's got adora. she's trying to move her with a harness]  
> [ **Glimmer:** I could teleport but]

"But you'd wake her up! Don't you _dare_."

> [ **Glimmer:** I think she thinks I go to 2 many meetings]  
> [ **Adora:** FIRST EXTRACTION ATTEMPT FAILED. WE NEED TO RETHINK OUR APPROACH.]  
> [ **Glimmer:** as soon as she wakes up, I'll bring u dinner. meet on the terrace?]

"Only if you take a LOT more pictures. I'll handle the Council."

> [ **Glimmer:** deal]  
> [ **Glimmer:** ur the best]  
> [ **Glimmer:** *<3*]

Bow grins, pockets his pad and goes in to tell the assembled generals and notables of Bright Moon that their Queen has been unavoidably detained.


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Schmoopiest Chapter Yet

**on the edge of consciousness**

Glimmer had been signing decrees. She remembers that, very clearly; the morning sun through the high windows of the Queen's private chambers, the silver-handled penknife that her father gave her. The stack of neat scrolls, each one tied perfectly with a lilac ribbon, laid out pretty as flowers on her mother's ornate rowan-wood desk with its inset quill-holders and quartz case for the royal seal. The scrolls crackled like dead leaves when she opened them, with a dry inky smell that woke dim memories of the afternoons she spent playing under this desk while her mother fussed and scribbled, trying to keep a failing kingdom together. She used to fall asleep here, curled up on the carpet in front of the fire, while the Queen wrote and argued with ministers until the sun rose.

She doesn't remember falling asleep this time, but someone's poking her awake. "Hey, Sparkles. What are you doing? It's like the middle of the afternoon. We're supposed to meet Perfuma for that stretching thing."

Catra's sitting on the edge of the desk and frowning down at her, which is odd. Usually she'd be smirking at the sight of the Queen of Bright Moon slumped over snoring in a pile of scrolls, probably with ink splotches all over her face.

Glimmer growls and tries to swat her away without lifting her head. The desk feels better than the softest down pillow in the palace right now. "Maybe I'm exhausted because _someone_ was chasing mice in her sleep all night." 

Catra doesn't rise to the bait. "Are you sick or something? You smell weird."

" _You_ smell weird." 

"I cannot believe they let you run this place," Catra says, but it comes out worried instead of teasing. She reaches for Glimmer's face, but pride lends Glimmer strength and she straightens up, out of reach. The light's changed; Catra's right, they'll be late for Perfuma. And it's gotten cold, much colder than she ever remembers this room getting in the spring. Maybe there's a draft somewhere. She'll have to remember to tell Evarrin, the groundskeeper -- 

A hot hand brushes the side of her face. Catra's much closer than she was a second ago, practically nose to nose, her tail whipping back and forth, tracing weirdly mesmerizing coils in the air.

At least until she hisses in alarm and it fluffs up like a bottlebrush. That's probably not good. "Sparkles?" she says, and then, "Glimmer," which is definitely a bad sign. But not as bad as when Catra straightens up and yells, " _Adora_!"

"I'm fine," Glimmer protests. Catra's hands are on her shoulders, pushing her back down into the chair, and she tries to brush them off but can't. There's a haze over everything, a kind of cloud. "I'm fine!" she says again, louder. Anger helps, it burns off a bit of the fog. She can see Adora now, the blue of sky in her eyes and the gold of sunlight in her hair. Scared, half-panicking. That's familiar, too, from a long time ago.

"Something's wrong with her! She was completely spaced out, and she's freezing! Fix it!"

"Glimmer," Adora says. Helpless, scared, determined. Like -- she remembers now. Like in Thaymor, the first day they met, in the battle with the Horde. Adora had leaned over her like that, afraid but determined, and Glimmer was too weak to help her, too cold to move…

Oh.

A flash of light, here and back then; only this time She-Ra kisses her, urgent, desperate. Light spreads from her lips, hot as molten metal but painless, burning like ice, and for a second Glimmer feels like she'll fracture; then it cools, calms. She can feel her body again, feel how weak and sluggish it is, and how cold. Adora's borrowed warmth was just enough to start her shivering, and now she can't stop.

"What did you do? You made it worse!"

"No I didn't! I don't know! That -- that usually works!"

 _Like making out with the sun_ , Catra complained last time Adora used that trick on her, after they almost drowned on Septime's moon. She wasn't wrong.

"I'm f-fine." Glimmer grips the arms of her mother's ornate chair, trying not to fall out of it. "It's Entrapta."

Adora’s frowning. "Entrapta's here?" 

Catra's ears are back, her eyes narrowed. "What did she do to you? If this is another prank, I'll make her tiny robots pay."

"It's not a prank." At least she hopes it isn't. "She's d-doing something -- draining m-magic. Under the palace. Some k-kind of sponge. Or a t-tank." Something about trying to gather magic from Etheria so they could take it into space. Glimmer didn't follow the details all that well the first six times Entrapta tried to explain it, and it's twice as hard to remember through the void of exhaustion yawning to swallow her again. “I have to --“

She tries to shove herself out of the chair and makes it just far enough that she falls forward into Catra, who catches her and holds her a little too tightly, just for a heartbeat, then pushes her back down. “And what are you going to do, faint on her?”

"I have to g-get down there! B-Bow was with her --"

"Probably tied up in a corner," Catra mutters. "I'll handle this." She hovers for a second, then tilts Glimmer's chin up with one claw and kisses her, quick and pointed where Adora was lingering. Then she's gone. Glimmer doesn't see her go, but she does see her eyes, like an afterimage: gold and blue. Both of her loves, blue and gold, gold and blue. It's getting hard to think again; she can't figure out if that means anything.

“Glimmer! Stay with me,” Adora pleads, from the far shore of a dim heaving sea. Glimmer grits her teeth, fights her way back towards Adora’s voice, the achingly familiar safety of her arms. Adora’s holding her, carrying her through a vast rush of wind. “Stay with me,” Adora says again, and Glimmer feels her kisses like droplets of molten gold, the only warmth in the world, on her forehead and then on her lips. “Don’t leave me. Don’t leave _us_.”

From the center of her, a soundless battle cry pierces the darkness like a flaming spear: _Never!_

The towering inferno of rage and refusal thaws her just a little, enough that she can feel a hard flat surface underneath her: the Moonstone’s mirror. She’s passed out and woken up here too many times not to recognize its cool glass against the side of her face. In her fury and frustration, there's suddenly a flicker of plain embarassment; she can’t die like _this_. At the very least she’d want to go defending Bright Moon from some kind of monster...

“Glimmer!”

Feeling is creeping back into her hands and feet, in prickling bursts like scalding rain. When she opens her eyes she can see Adora’s smile, and she can feel Adora’s fingers stroke the side of her face. “There you are.” 

Over Adora’s shoulder the Moonstone hangs motionless, blotting out the sky. It's clouded like Glimmer's vision was, swirling with an oily darkness that makes her nauseous just to look at it. But even as she watches it fades, breaks into wisps and tendrils, dissipates like smoke.

She sees a familiar silhouette reflected in its curve, then Catra’s fingers run whisper-light down her spine, between her wings. "Hey." 

"Hi." Glimmer still feels like she got run over by a procession of tanks, but her head is clearing, and she can sit up without blacking out. Overhead the afternoon is sinking towards dusk, and she can see past the tower's edge that there seems to be a lot of excitement around the palace gates. "What the hell just happened?"

Adora sits next to her on the edge of the mirror and wraps both arms around her, pulling her close. Glimmer burrows into her jacket; she’s shivering with a completely non-spooky chill, as the high wind slices through her gossamer cape. Catra perches on the mirror's edge, just close enough to rest a cautious hand on Glimmer’s shoulder, the nearest part of her she can reach. "I went down to the basement. Found Bow locked in a storage closet and Entrapta sucking all the magic out of Bright Moon with some machine. So I smashed it."

"Catra," Adora sighs, but there's not much heat in it.

"What? She'll be up all night fixing it, she loves doing stuff like that! And Bow’s fine, he’s on his way. Melog and I sort of...ran ahead.”

“Swift Wind, could you go get him?” Adora asks, and movement draws Glimmer’s eye to a tangle of color: Swift Wind and Melog, sprawled side by side in a curve of the wall, out of the wind, looking far too settled and comfortable to have just arrived in the last few minutes. How long was she out? 

Swift Wind salutes with one wing and chirps, “On it, boss!”

“Bow said something about bringing you cake,” Catra says, skeptical but too worried to get all the way to scorn. “He says that's important?"

"It is," Glimmer says solemnly. "It's a ritual." It had just been a cupcake, that first time she’d burnt out her powers when she was six; just something to stop her crying. But they'd kept it up until Glimmer went away to war. It always felt like it filled the cold void inside her a little.

Now, with a girlfriend curled up on either side of her, even still shivering, she hardly feels the cold at all. "My heroes," she says, throwing an arm around each of them. “You saved me.”

“Don’t get all weepy on us. It’s not cause we like you or anything,” Catra mutters. Melog pads over to rest her big wedge-shaped head on Glimmer’s knee.

“Don't listen to her,” Adora says, mostly muffled into Glimmer’s hair. “I love you. She’s just a jerk.”

“Excuse me, I wouldn't have had to do anything if _someone's_ glowy healing powers actually worked --”

“Shut up,” Glimmer says to both of them, and for once they actually listen. "I love you. Both of you." She squeezes Catra and plants an exuberant kiss on her cheek without moving out of Adora's arms. "You _saved_ me! I think I'm gonna have to give you a medal."

"No," Catra squeaks, hoarse and horrified. "Don't you dare."

"Pretty sure I have to. In front of everyone. Ooh, I could make you a knight!"

"Sir Catra, Rescuer of the Queen!" Adora interjects helpfully.

"Defender of the Realm," Glimmer adds. "It'll be amazing! Look --"

She starts to sketch something in bright lines of silver on the air. Catra grabs her wrists. "No magic. No medals. Just _sit quietly and recharge_."

Glimmer pouts. Then, when Catra proves immune to pouting (outwardly at least), Glimmer takes advantage of Catra's iron grip to pull her close, so she's practically in Glimmer's lap, well within kissing range. "I mean it. You are my hero."

"I'm running away to live in the Crimson Waste," Catra decides, but just then Bow arrives in the thunder of Swift Wind's wings, and she never does get the chance to make her escape.

**a close call**

The next morning, Catra vanishes from bed sometime in the dim hour before sunrise and doesn't show up to breakfast. 

It’s not the first time this has happened. Adora tries to give her space, which is what Perfuma and Bow and Glimmer are always telling her to do. But then Catra doesn't show up for lunch, either, and Adora stops worrying about what Perfuma and Bow and Glimmer think. She packs apples and sandwiches and climbs to the highest tower in the palace, that Glimmer gave Catra as her own private domain. The third window from the top opens out onto the sloping roof of the library, and from there it’s only a slightly perilous climb over slippery shingles to the gabled lookout farthest from the waterfall. Catra’s perched there, tail wrapped around her ankles, brooding between a pair of staring gargoyles. Adora looks for Melog, finds her draped over the angle of the roof, asleep in the sunshine, mane a reassuring blue.

Catra’s ears flick back at Adora’s approach. “Took you long enough.”

“Maybe you’re getting lazy. Think I’ll bring you lunch forever?”

Catra accepts the sandwich Adora hands her, slices it neatly into triangles and hands half back. “Yeah, actually.”

Adora takes it and dangles her feet over the roof’s edge. “Well, you’re probably right.” 

Catra eats two sandwiches and licks her claws clean. The low current of panic that’s been crackling under Adora’s skin all day is starting to ease; Catra’s melancholy, not falling apart. Whatever drove her up here can wait.

But it doesn’t have to wait long. After a while Catra says, “If I hadn’t found Glimmer yesterday, what would have happened to her?”

“I don’t know. She used up all her magic a few times back when everything started, but I’ve never seen it that bad.” Adora sees the look on Catra’s face and squeezes her shoulder. “Everything’s fine, Catra. You saved --”

Catra brushes her hand away. “Stop it. I don’t want sunshine and rainbows, I just --” she stops, breathes, curls up tighter again, chin on her knees. “I’m sorry. I’m not -- good company right now.”

Adora draws back, stung as though Catra had clawed her. Trying hard not to be. “I’m sorry, too. I shouldn’t have come -- you deserve as much space as you want. I’ll go.”

“Ugh, I can imagine your face,” Catra groans, hiding her own face in her arms. “Don’t be like that. I meant it, okay? I’m sorry I snapped at you. Perfuma says I turn all of my feelings into anger. We’re working on it.”

Melog’s sunk back into the shadow of a cornice, peering out at Adora with glimmering lapis eyes. 

“You’re allowed to be angry, Catra,” Adora says, with a sudden burst of shame. “Whatever you’re feeling is valid --”

This time Catra does look back at her, exasperation warring with amusement. “Don't get so worked up. I _know_ that, you goof.”

“Oh. Well that’s -- good.”

Catra rakes her fingers through her hair. “I’m _not_ angry. I’m just acting angry because… it’s easier to act that way than to admit… that I’m scared.”

“Oh.” The pieces fall into place. “Of what could have happened to Glimmer.”

“What almost _did_ happen. She could have _died_ , and not even because of a meteor or an alien monster, but from some stupid accident. It was a dial set wrong on Entrapta’s machine. Five more minutes --” she lets out a ragged breath. “A year ago I would have been glad. And now I…”

There are tears in her eyes. “Hey,” Adora says, and without thinking drops to her knees and pulls Catra close. “Hey, it’s okay. I was scared, too.”

“It was bad enough when all I cared about was you,” Catra grumbles into her shoulder. “You’re dumb but at least you’re basically indestructible. You drove a skiff full-speed into a tree and came out of it with a magical destiny.”

“Uh, I think you drove us into the tree.”

“Debatable.” 

They both giggle. Catra’s gone from stiffly tolerating Adora’s touch to clinging, wrapping around her as much as possible. “I just -- I’m scared. And it hurts. What if I --” she swallows, clings harder. “I killed her mother.”

“That’s different,” Adora says quickly. “Catra, it’s not the same, you’d never hurt her --”

“No. But someone else might. And if I can’t make sure you two are okay -- if I lose you, either of you, after everything -- or even Arrow Boy, or Glimmer's dad, or your ridiculous horse --”

"Who all have names, that you definitely know --"

"-- I hate thinking about it, okay? I hate feeling like -- someone might get hurt, and I can't -- do anything about it." She stops, scowling. “I sound like you. Is this how you feel _all the time_?” 

Adora snorts. “Basically.”

“No wonder you’re so neurotic,” Catra mutters. Then, open, pleading, “How do I make it stop hurting so much?”

“I don't know,” Adora says at last. “I don't think you can. You keep everyone as safe as you can and then you just have to -- let it hurt. But it's a good pain, kind of. Better than being alone.”

"I guess." Catra's quiet a while. Then says, very softly, “I’ve never had this much to lose before.”

Adora moves her hand up Catra’s back, between her knife-sharp shoulderblades, until her fingertips find the raised tangle of scars at the back of her neck. Catra’s light in her arms, practically boneless, dead weight but undeniably, lithely, urgently alive; and Glimmer’s downstairs arguing with ministers, and Bow’s having tea with his dads, and the rest of the Princesses are over the horizon, rebuilding their kingdoms into the pillars of a planet at peace. “Neither have I.”

**when words aren't enough, part III**

They don't make her suffer through a ceremony in front of the whole court, but Glimmer does give Catra a medal; a small disc of silver, about the size of a transmitter badge. It fits in her palm with an easy heft and weight, and at first she keeps it in her pocket and takes it out during boring conversations, flipping it between her fingers, liking its shine. But every time Bow sees her with it he gets this adoring and weepy look on his face, clearly remembering the time she was the one who kept him from losing Glimmer, and that awkwardness is way worse then boredom, so she starts leaving it in her room instead.

She goes back to look at it every once in a while, or when she feels like it's time to change the hiding place where she stashes the handful of things she doesn't want anyone else to find. It's always a little warm to the touch, no matter how long it's been since she held it; and if she tilts it in a sunbeam just right, she's positive there's a faint pink shimmer in its depths, like quartz. One side is inlaid with the seal of Bright Moon, the familiar wings-and-crescent that's stamped on literally everything in the palace. On the other side is another moon, full this time, with faintly roughened markings in the shape of a cat's paw, and below it a tiny heart flanked by its own little wings. Catra's seen Glimmer's painted-on wings enough to recognize them, even redone in silver and so small they're barely visible.

Around the outside is the legend: _Sir Catra, Defender of the Queen_.

It's completely stupid. All she did was break one of Entrapta's gadgets, which she'd do any time for any reason, just because it's fun. She doesn't see at all why Glimmer had to make a big deal out of it. 

But she keeps the medal, and when Glimmer and Adora bully her into going to things like state functions and Princess balls, she sometimes threads it onto a stolen lilac ribbon and hangs it around Melog's neck. It makes her feel a little steadier. Like an anchor; like proof of something.

**on the edge of consciousness, part II**

Sunrise in Bright Moon finds Adora out on the terrace, doing pushups and watching the crystal spires blush with streaks of pink and gold. After two hundred pushups she jogs twice around the lake, hearing the tangled dark of the Whispering Wood come alive with song and motion as the shadows withdraw and the night-sleeping creatures put feelers out of their dens. She detours through the village most mornings, waving to Evarrin who’s always up with the dawn, and the Weavers who run the bakery. When she’s early enough sometimes she stops and gets a treat from Yarrow, the baker’s daughter, who’s fourteen and wants to grow up to be She-Ra. Today it’s a basket of hot muffins shaped like pumpkins.

The guards salute as she runs back up the road to the palace, which is embarrassing, but Glimmer refuses to make them stop. On days when the Council meets early Glimmer sometimes even comes to lounge at one of the front windows to watch her, usually with her chin in one hand, a forgotten mug of tea in the other, and a dopey, dazzling smile on her face.

This morning the window’s empty, so Adora keeps a steady pace down the hall, up a twisting flight of stairs, across an ornamental garden, down another hall, and bursts into the royal bedroom. “Wakey-wakey! It’s another beautiful morning!”

Silence.

The workout is just a warmup: this is truly her greatest challenge of the day. She cracks her knuckles, marshals her forces and mounts the first assault.

Pale fingers of sunlight are struggling to poke through the heavy purple drapes over the east window. Adora pulls them open, letting in a burst of brilliance and birdsong. “Hey, they should rename this place Bright Sun!”

The lump on the bed answers her with a duet of growls and groans. Catra's tail is hanging over the edge of the mattress; Adora tickles it until it disappears, then leans over to poke a pale pink-winged shoulder. “Come on, get up! You guys should see the waterfall, it’s practically a rainbow!”

Glimmer turns her face into Catra’s shoulder, hiding from the light. “Ugh. Has she always been like this?”

Adora tries to pull the blanket off, but Catra was expecting that; she latches onto it with her claws and curls around Glimmer, pulling it back over them both. “You think this is bad? You should have heard her in the Fright Zone. ‘Catra, come outside, the slime is so shiny today! Catra, the deathbot's lasers are so beautiful, I know we see them every single second of every single day but seeing them again _right now_ is definitely way more important than sleep --’”

“You’re just jealous that I got to see the shiniest slime and you didn’t,” Adora sings. “You know, if you got up and trained with me, I bet you’d be at least as strong as She-Ra.”

“I’d rather _literally_ be eaten by spiderwolves.”

Adora wiggles the basket she's carrying, letting the cover slip off so the fresh-baked pumpkin smell fills the room. “Glimmer? You’re not mean like she is, right? Look! I brought breakfast!” 

Glimmer emerges cautiously from the blankets, hair hilariously disheveled, like the tentacles of a sparkly purple deep-sea monster. She eyes the muffins with a gleam of interest. “Are those --”

“Don’t listen to her,” Catra says urgently. “You think she’s all sweetness and light, but she will say anything to get you up, and then she’ll make you _jog_. Is that what you want?”

“Mmmnope.” Glimmer sinks back into the blankets and into Catra’s soft, warm fur. “‘M staying here with Catra.”

“Traitor.” Adora pouts. “Guess I’ll have to eat all these delicious muffins by myself, and then go do-- uh -- something _really fun_.”

“Tragic. You’ll live.” Catra says. “Now get out and let us sleep.”

“Or you could stay,” Glimmer mumbles.

Catra’s nose wrinkles. “I dunno, Sparkles. She’s all sweaty.”

“Duh. ‘S nice.” Glimmer emerges from the sea-foam blankets again, propping herself up on one elbow long enough to get a handful of Adora’s grimy armless shirt and pull her down into a kiss. For a minute it looks like Adora might be nearing victory -- she breaks away and Glimmer whines in disappointment, reaching out and finding only air. 

“No more kisses until you get up,” Adora declares.

Glimmer falls back onto the pillow, one arm across her stricken brow. “You know, that would really hurt, if I didn’t have _another_ girlfriend -- who was _right here_ \--”

“Nerd,” Catra says, but she’s happy enough to supply the deficiency. Seeing Adora’s hurt look, she gives Glimmer one last thorough kiss and smirks over her shoulder. “Give it up, Adora. You’re no match for both of us.”

She-Ra is mighty indeed, but Adora’s learned when to admit defeat. Catra lets her lift up the blanket this time and she crawls in behind Glimmer, who gives her a haughty look but accepts her smooch of apology and snuggles happily into her arms. 

In five minutes Glimmer and Catra are asleep again, soft and shining, wrapped in each other and the morning light. It is, Adora thinks, a more beautiful sight than any waterfall. Someday she might even admit it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Once again, part of this chapter was inspired by a post from @artofkace over on tumblr. Specifically, the last bit was sparked by this comic: https://artofkace.tumblr.com/post/613244277094563840/good-morning-you-are-lovedsoft-glimmadora
> 
> (and, more recently, this one: https://artofkace.tumblr.com/post/623022723742957568/customary-reformed-horde-soldiers-first-night-in)
> 
> I know I keep saying this, but: one more chapter planned!


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A Day in the Fright Zone.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This one is less schmoopy fluff, more Horde kid cameos and AU-building. There is more fluff to come; stay tuned!

**coming home, part II**

It’s only an hour or two by skiff, but they take Darla so they can all go at once; the four of them plus Micah and Castaspella, who spend the whole trip talking in thorny magical equations despite Glimmer’s increasingly frustrated attempts to give them a tour of the ship. Catra and Adora stay on the bridge, watching Bow drive, staying mostly silent. 

The sun gleaming off Scorpia’s dazzling carapace guides them to the launch pad like a beacon. She runs over as the gangplank rolls down and sweeps each of them into a gigantic hug, even Castaspella. “Hey! Hi there! Thank you guys _so_ much for coming! I really can’t tell you how great it is to see you. Oh, make sure you get your gift bags! One for everyone, that’s right --”

A handful of clones comes crowding in behind her, all garlanded with cactus-flowers and shiny bits of salvage, all beaming. Catra flinches back instinctively from the sea of identical chalk-white faces, but Adora’s behind her, steadying her with a hand at her waist and a brief kiss to the tip of one ear. The nearest clone burbles “Welcome, brother!” and shoves a little paper sack into her hands and then they’re through, out into the scorched and barren waste surrounding what used to be the Fright Zone.

The vista of metal and acid-green ooze they grew up with is gone, of course. The parts that gleamed and glowed are mostly rusted over, and the parts that used to loom menacingly like fangs against the sky have collapsed into craters. The exuberant flourishing of the Heart’s magic is more restrained here; there are no gigantic vines, no enormous outsized trees or ferns the size of sailboats. Except for the lumpy cacti dotted with the kind of blossoms all the clones are wearing, it actually still looks pretty lifeless.

Scorpia appears noiselessly behind them and smacks Adora on the back with one claw. “I know, it’s different, right? But you’ll love what we’ve done with the place. Hang on! Wait a second. Adora, didn’t you get a gift bag?”

Adora’s focus is torn between rubbing her shoulder and watching Catra’s face. “What? Oh no, Scorpia, that’s okay, I don’t --”

“Don’t be ridiculous, we have plenty! Flower!” She waves at one of the clones, who scurries over with another little paper bag. “Adora, meet Flower Hordak, she’s got a gift bag for you -- there you go. Enjoy!”

Catra snorts. “Flower Hordak?”

“I have chosen this designation, brother. It reflects my intention to grow and become yet more beautiful!” Flower Hordak beams, then hesitates. “Does it not please you?”

“No, no, Catra would never say that! She loves your designation! Right, Catra?” Scorpia nudges Catra sharply in the kidneys with one pincer.

Catra looks into the sharply-angled narrow face with its flat pupilless eyes. The same face that was responsible for tormenting her for most of her life and then trying to kill and brainwash her for a short but eventful part of it. Flower’s lips are trembling. Catra doesn’t know what she’ll do if Flower starts to cry.

Scorpia jabs her again. Catra pulls herself together. “Oh, uh, right. That’s -- that’s fine. I mean, it’s a -- nice name.”

Flower Hordak beams even wider, if that’s possible. “Thank you, brother!”

Adora, useless as always, is rooting through her gift bag. “What is this stuff?”

Scorpia beams. “It was Perfuma’s idea! Well, kind of. She reminded me that people probably have a lot of negative associations with, you know, the Fright Zone, the whole war, and all the general, uh, mayhem and destruction. So I thought, what’s the best way to make people feel good about coming here? Presents!”

“A rock?” Catra picks through her own bag, which looks like mostly junk. “Is this a bolt?”

“A bolt from one of Horde Prime’s ships! It crashed just over the ridge. Your very own little piece of Horde Prime’s empire that you can take home and crush or destroy to get all that anger out. And there’s candy in there, too!”

Catra fishes out the candy. It’s a packet of the acid orange rock-hard sugar lumps that Octavia used to hide in a locked chest behind a false floor panel under her bed. “Wow, you got the good stuff. That is...actually kind of a great idea. Thanks, Scorpia.”

“And the dunking booth for the clones is over there, just past that melted guard tower! Don’t worry, it’s all volunteer clones,” she adds, seeing a spasm of horror pass over Catra’s face. “I guess they had a ritual kind of like it? Some of them said they missed it. We’re working on new things to chant, though, the chants they have are a little unsettling. But it really helps people to have a healthy way to work out some of their aggression.” She gives them each a friendly shoulder pinch. “It really is so great to see you guys. I’ve gotta run, gotta show Glimmer’s dad the Black Garnet, but we’ll catch up later, I promise!”

She jogs away over the uneven earth to join Micah and Castaspella, who seem to be arguing over the rocks that came in their gift bags, and Glimmer, half-listening with her arms crossed. At Scorpia's shout Glimmer looks up, vanishes, and reappears between Catra and Adora with an arm around each of them. “Hey. You guys okay?”

“We’re fine,” Adora says confidently. “Right, Catra?”

Catra rubs her cheek against Glimmer’s, then turns to kiss her. How strange to be back where she lived for almost her entire life, her old kingdom and undisputed hunting ground, and she needs the scent of a Princess’ silly flowery soap to settle her racing heart. “Yeah. Go do your thing, Sparkles.”

“Love you.” Glimmer kisses Adora too, then poofs out again.

Bow’s been dragged off in the coils of Entrapta’s hair, and the clones of the welcome committee are dispersing. Catra presses close to Adora, twining their fingers together. “Shouldn’t you be helping them, as the Princessiest Princess of them all?”

“Entrapta says destroying the Heart took the entire system offline. I don’t have administrator privileges anymore. They’ll call me if they need me.”

Catra pops one of the little orange candies into her mouth. She’s eaten enough real food in Bright Moon to know that it tastes genuinely awful, but that doesn’t change the fact that she loves it. “You know, if you wanted to spend the day with me, all you had to do was ask.”

Adora steals the next candy out of her hand. “Want to spend the day together hanging out in the Fright Zone, Catra?” 

Catra swipes Adora’s whole gift bag and adds it to hers. “Wow, I don’t know, I’ve been kinda busy lately. Let me check my schedule --”

“Jerk.”

“Loser.”

Without any real idea of where they’re going, they drift toward the barracks compound where their old bunks and training simulators were. Up close the damage is more obvious, and more jarring. Hordak’s old command wing, built like an insect’s shell around his throne room and labs, has been sliced to pieces from the inside out. The guard towers are all melted. In the center of their outward-facing ring is a wide clear space where the munitions dump used to be; now it’s a carnival, dense with a cheerful crowd of ex-Horde soldiers, reptilian desert-dwellers, and beaming clones.

They steer clear of it, partly to avoid the clones, and partly because it’s nice to be just the two of them, nobody’s villain or hero, not the center of anyone’s myth or legend. Just a couple of scrappy kids trying to make it in the only world they knew.

After a while Adora says, “Well, Shadow Weaver did always say we’d change the way things ran around here.”

Catra sinks her claws into Adora’s palm just short of drawing blood, the old instinctive signal for terror and silence. The utter finality of seeing Shadow Weaver’s ruined face hasn’t left her, but this is also like the fourth or fifth time she watched Shadow Weaver die in front of her, and the other times all it did was slow her down. And here, where her black magic permeated every air duct and unlit corner, the shadows themselves have ears and might rise up at the sound of her name.

Adora understands all of that without a word. “I’m sorry. I didn’t think.”

Catra has to breathe for a second. “It’s -- it’s okay. I don’t want to talk about her.”

“Me either.” 

They turn a corner, past the cracked-open husk of a hangar. A familiar voice echoes down a side passage. Following it leads them into a sort of amphitheater, with long bench seats made from sewage pipes. Each bench is occupied by a dozen clones, all chanting in unison as Perfuma moves the point of a long willow branch along a row of pictures she’s painted with berry dyes on the hangar wall. On the _classroom_ wall. “River,” the clones recite, “tree, bird, hill, apple, rain, cloud, pinecone.”

“Fantastic!” Perfuma claps in delight and points out a clone in the front row. “You. What’s your name?”

The clone whispers intently to its neighbors. Finally one of them says, “Pardon us, brother, but this one has not yet chosen a designation.”

“Oh -- of course! That’s okay, we all choose names in our own time. Maybe you could use one of these! Which of these things is your favorite?”

The clone thinks for a long moment. “Please explain again, brother,” it says hesitantly. “‘Favorite’ is -- most pleasing to Horde Prime?”

A murmur of dissent runs through the room. A clone in the back row shouts, “Most pleasing to _your_ will, brother! I favorite the cloud, for it is _least_ like Horde Prime!”

This sparks such intense discussion that Perfuma can barely make herself heard over the din. “Good! That’s...very good! Now everyone just settle down, and we’ll go over it again…”

Catra tugs on Adora’s hand, pulling her away. “I need air,” she murmurs. 

She breaks away from Adora, leaps for the nearest jut of a crumpled steel wall and clambers up, beam to ledge to rubble. Her old perches are long gone, but she finds a docking arch, the highest she can go. That was always what she needed, to get up, above the smog and slime, where she could see the whole horizon and nothing could sneak up on her.

Adora follows, like she always does. That’s never changed. “I know you said you’d be fine,” Adora says, going down on one knee to keep her balance, a half-step below the capstone of the arch. “But if there are too many of them, we can go back to the ship. Or Glimmer could take us home.”

“I said I’d be fine and I am fine,” Catra snaps. “Just --” she chokes down her instinctive plea, her one deep desire, then takes a settling breath and says it anyway, because it’s not weakness to ask. “Just don’t let them touch me. Please.”

“I won’t.” Adora wraps both arms around her waist. 

Catra relaxes into Adora’s steady hold. “Prime made them from his own cells, he fed them and kept them alive, and trained them, and they were just -- things, to him. Worthless garbage. They were worthless garbage to _themselves_ because that was how he saw them. Us.” She looks down at her hands, slides her claws out, retracts them. “You know, it wasn’t really that much of a change for me.”

“Catra,” Adora says, fierce and grieved.

“It’s okay.” Catra kisses her cheek. “I’m okay,” she says, and means it. “I had you, even when I didn’t. And I had Glimmer. That’s more than any of my _brothers_ had. They’ll learn. We did.”

The carnival is below them, a jumbled sweep of motion and noise. Off to the left are the dunking booths: flimsy little chairs made of scrap metal, balanced over a couple of the big vats from Acid Storage, now repurposed as water tanks. Scorpia’s right, it’s a popular attraction. Half the carnival’s lined up waiting to take a rock from a grinning clone to hurl at a panel painted with Horde Prime’s scary tentacled face.

A clone goes sputtering into the vat, and all the rest of the clones cheer. Catra shudders. The next person in line steps up -- scrawny as a bag of sticks, wearing a patched and dusty combat envirosuit, no helmet, but hair so mussed he must have just taken one off. The ash-blond hair is familiar, but she doesn’t recognize him until he winds up to throw his rock. She’d know that pathetic toss anywhere. 

She slips out of Adora’s hold and scampers down a tangle of pipes, scattering bolts and flanges. “Hey! It’s Kyle! Kyle, you’re all--”

A plasma burst sears the dust by her feet, knocking her aside. 

“Get away from him!”

Catra skids and lands flat on her back, blinking up at Kyle’s sunburned face. “Glad...you’re alive,” she tells him. He boggles at her.

“I said _get away_!” Lonnie comes striding through the crowd, waving a stun baton in the air. It crackles and spits green static; primed for another burst. The line for the dunking booth has mysteriously vanished. 

Catra sits up cautiously and scoots backwards, hands out in the open. No point taking chances. Rogelio strides calmly past her, picks Kyle up and carries him in the crook of one elbow back behind Lonnie’s defensive perimeter. A pair of ice cream cones are melting in Rogelio’s other hand. 

“I wasn’t going to hurt him!” Catra protests. “Honest.”

Adora comes scrambling down the last pipe. “Catra! Are you okay?” 

Catra rubs at a scraped elbow and makes a face. “I’m fine. I probably deserved that.”

 _“Probably?_ ” The stun baton swings back to point between Catra’s eyes, but the threat is kind of undermined by the raspberry stickiness oozing from the ice cream cone in Lonnie’s other hand. At least until Rogelio takes it from her so she can get both hands on her weapon in the regulation grip. Lonnie was always the best shot in the whole squad. 

Catra grins, a slow smile with a hint of fang. “All right, I definitely deserved that.”

Adora puts herself between them. “Lonnie, listen, I don’t know what she did to you, but things have changed --”

“Like I need to hear that from you!”

“Chill out, Adora.” Catra pulls herself up on Adora’s jacket and brushes the red dust out of her fur. She meets Lonnie’s eye. “You didn’t use to suck so much at target practice. Want to take another shot?”

Lonnie stares her down for six seconds, which is just long enough for Kyle to warble, “Uh, guys,” and for Adora to start to reach for the sword gauntlet on her wrist.

Then Lonnie grins and flicks the firing stud. The stun baton sputters and dies. “Not if you’re just gonna _give_ it to me. At least make me work for it.”

“Down, girl.” Catra tugs on Adora’s jacket again and slips past her, holding out a hand. “I really am sorry. For...everything. I’m glad you guys got out.” She glances over at Rogelio, who’s munching contentedly on two ice cream cones and seems to have no intention of putting Kyle down. Not that Kyle seems to mind. “I’m glad you got away from me.”

Lonnie shakes Catra’s hand. Catra flinches at the squish of sticky raspberry residue, and Lonnie smirks. “You’re apologizing? Wow. things really have changed.”

She gives Adora the same once-over that Catra gave Rogelio. Adora stands speechless, yearning and afraid and confused and concerned, but Lonnie hasn’t been a soldier so long to miss the way Adora’s angled herself to be able to jump between them again in half a heartbeat if she needs to. To be able to shield Catra at the first sign of trouble.

“So,” Lonnie says softly, “you guys finally worked it out, huh?”

Catra’s shoulders hunch and her ears flatten in embarrassment. “Most of it. It’s...a work in progress.”

Rogelio licks a drop of ice cream off Kyle’s forehead with his long forked tongue. Kyle laughs. Lonnie doesn’t turn, but Catra’s known her practically since she was born, and she can read the slight relaxation in Lonnie’s stance like Adora can read First Ones runes. “I know what you mean.”

Catra wipes the melted ice cream off her hand on the sleeve of Lonnie's envirosuit. “Come on. I’ll buy you all a drink.”

“That’ll be a start on the six months of back pay you owe us,” Lonnie says flatly. “Plus overtime. A _lot_ of overtime.”

“Wait until you see the treasury I have now,” Catra says airily. “Come on, Adora.”

They’re halfway to the little cafe-and-ice-cream counter that used to be a bot factory when Adora’s mouth catches up to her brain. “Hang on a second. You guys got _paid_?”

**broken glass**

The Black Garnet looks smaller than it used to. At first Glimmer assumes it's just because she’s lost her fear of it, after all she’s been through since the Princess Prom. Then Scorpia walks up to it and raises one pincer like she’s about to tap a gigantic bell, until a red spark leaps the gap between claw and crystal. With Scorpia beside it, Glimmer's positive it's a least a head shorter than it used to be.

“Well, Princess,” Micah says, grave and courteous as befits an address to a fellow monarch. “What seems to be the problem?”

“Ah,” Scorpia says. At least she doesn’t cringe at the _Princess_. “Well. It’s kind of, uh -- hard to explain.” 

“So you said in your message.” Micah locks his hands behind his back and rocks on the balls of his feet, looking up at the Black Garnet. “Since we’re here, there are some basic tests we can run -- right, Casta? Princess Scorpia, is there anywhere you’d like us to start?”

“Oh -- just Scorpia, please, King Glimmer’s Dad. Sir. I, uh -- oh man, listen, I’m not any good at this Princess thing. I don’t know if I’m doing something wrong, or -- or well, really, that’s the only thing I could think of that would be bothering her. So if you could tell me what I’m doing, or not doing --”

Castaspella raises an eyebrow. “Bothering her? Bothering who, dear?”

“The Garnet,” Scorpia corrects herself. “I mean. You know. That’s how I -- think of her. Oh, I’m not doing this right either, am I.”

“Don’t worry, Prin -- Scorpia.” Micah pats her on the shoulder. “You’re doing just fine. Every Runestone is different, with different needs. We’d be honored to help you make sure the Garnet is working as well as it can be.”

The clamps that held it are gone, have probably been gone for ages, along with the crooked spine of black metal that held it in Shadow Weaver’s cage of wires. Now the Garnet floats on its own, about a hand’s breadth above the floor. Scorch marks encircle it in great curves slashed into metal and rock, but whatever debris must have been here has been cleared away, along with all the computer banks and half the walls. There’s no Black Garnet chamber anymore; now it’s more of a courtyard. Glimmer likes it better this way. 

The sun shines down. The Garnet is rounder than Glimmer remembers it, less jagged, and also less black. The red facets catch the light and hold it, like fire but more steady, like blood but more clear. A living, luxurious light, heart’s light.

Castaspella pulls a roll of parchment out of her sleeve. “We’ll begin with the basics. Princess Scorpia, has your power been behaving erratically? Have you experienced any disruptive or intrusive visions? Any deep feelings of foreboding?”

Glimmer lets herself drift closer to the Garnet as Scorpia stammers her way through the questions. It’s not just the shape, or color, or size. “Something’s different,” she says aloud, interrupting her aunt. “Scorpia’s right. It doesn’t -- feel the same as it used to.”

Casta raises the other eyebrow, but the pronouncements of her favorite niece carry much more weight than the opinions of any other princess. “What did it used to feel like?”

“Like glitching.” In answer to their blank and puzzled looks, she adds, “It hurt.” Like fire under her skin, like crackling current along her nerves. Even just being in the same room with it, when she’d brought Scorpia here to balance the planet, had been enough to resurrect a dim, distant ghost of that pain. Not that she’d noticed it then, under her desperate hope and fury and fear.

Scorpia’s watching her, pincers locked nervously together. Glimmer says, “It doesn’t hurt anymore. Not like it used to.”

Micah and Casta share a worried look. Casta says, “Glimmer, perhaps you’d be more comfortable with the others --”

“No. It’s okay.” Glimmer presses her hand to the Garnet. It still doesn’t hurt. It’s hot enough that it probably should, but the heat is intense, not painful. 

“We’ll go take some measurements on the level of ambient magic in the area,” she hears her father saying, as he ushers Castaspella back out into the ruins of the lab. Scorpia’s reflection, somehow clearer than it should be in the Garnet’s red depths, comes up behind her and stops at arm’s length, claws still interlocked, tail curling and uncurling. 

“What does it feel like to you?” Glimmer asks her.

“Sad,” Scorpia says softly. “Like she’s crying.”

“Oh, Scorpia, I’m so sorry. This is all my fault! I pushed you to connect to it before you were ready, and then when I realized what a mistake I’d made by activating the Heart, I hit it with my power -- and now it’s hurting you. I should never have --”

Scorpia sweeps her up into a hug. “Shh. It’s okay.”

“It’s not okay,” Glimmer says, but it’s weirdly difficult to stay upset with Scorpia holding her six inches off the ground and squeezing her like a stuffed toy. Hugs must really be one of her Princess powers.

“Yeah, it’s not you. It was fine during the war! I mean, she -- it -- we both were so, you know, terrified all the time -- and excited! but mostly terrified -- and it felt _right_ , using my power to protect everyone. But then…” she sets Glimmer down gently. “My first night back here, after everything was over, it was so calm and peaceful. There was no breeze, there was just the moons…” Scorpia puts both claws on the Garnet, presses her forehead against its broadest facet. “I felt her just...call to me. I came and sat here with her, but she was just so sad. And it hasn’t stopped since then.”

Glimmer rests a hand on the back of Scorpia’s shoulder plate, as high up as she can reach. Her chitin radiates the same vibrant, almost-painful heat as the Garnet. “Oh, Scorpia.” 

Scorpia looks back over her shoulder. “You didn’t get a gift bag, did you?”

“What? No, I don’t need a --”

“Here.” Scorpia slips something out of a pocket on her vest and holds it out. A dull ember; a smooth sliver of red glass. “Whether or not you or your dad can fix the Garnet, I want you to have this. To thank you for finally bringing us together. Even if it did kind of almost destroy the world a little bit.”

Speechless, Glimmer takes the shard of the Black Garnet. Even dull and disconnected, it gives off a low but steady heat in her palm. “It... broke?”

“Yeah. Little pieces kept falling off. It’s mostly stopped now.”

Glimmer turns the shard over in her hand. It’s a darker hue than the living Garnet. “Magic leaves behind residue. Maybe it was getting rid of all those years of Shadow Weaver’s power. Healing itself.”

Scorpia brightens, holds her tail a little straighter. “Oh, do you think? Perfuma keeps saying that we all have to unlearn toxic patterns from the Horde. Not that it was _all_ bad. But most of it was...pretty bad.”

Glimmer turns the shard over, looking for menace in its depths, but it just looks like ordinary glass. "Adora and Catra told me -- I mean, they told me about some of it."

“So if it's not Shadow Weaver hurting the Garnet anymore, it has to be me. Something I did. What if… do you think she’s mad at me? For not stopping Shadow Weaver? I mean, do you think I could have just come down here any time and said, hey, back off, that’s my magic! -- and then Shadow Weaver wouldn’t have been able to hurt anyone.” To the Garnet she says, “She wouldn’t have been able to hurt _you_.”

"If you'd taken the Black Garnet back sooner, it would have activated the Heart, before Adora knew what it was or how to defeat it," Glimmer points out. "And... we all did things we regret. I betrayed my friends and almost destroyed the planet. It never changed the Moonstone -- even if maybe it should have.” She holds a shimmer in her palm, just for a second, and lets it go. “The Garnet must know that you did the best you could.”

"Perfuma keeps talking about watering hers, but I don't think the Garnet wants to be watered. I mean, I tried it anyway, and it didn't help. I didn't think it would, but, you know, better soaked than sorry." She rubs the back of her neck, where the scars from the chip have faded almost to white. "I probably should have asked in that message I sent you, but I'm gonna be honest, I was a little embarrassed. Does... your Runestone ever cry?"

“The Moonstone did feel different after my mom died,” Glimmer says quietly. “I had more power, but it was -- heavier. Like I’d never really felt it before, like -- she was sheltering me from it. Until I was strong enough.”

Scorpia slides down the Garnet, sits with her back to it, resting her head against it so her hair glows in its radiance like a cloud at sunset. “My moms died so long ago. I never even got to say goodbye.” She curls her tail around the Garnet’s point. “Maybe she didn’t either.”

Glimmer sits next to her, knees pulled up to her chest, the Garnet piece hot in her hand. “Tell me about them.”

“I don’t remember much,” Scorpia says. “They were so beautiful. And they loved -- everything. The world. Each other. They loved me so, so much. I wanted to grow up to be just like them. They were so proud, when Hordak’s soldiers came and said I was going to be trained to be a Captain someday. It was the last time I ever saw them.” Tears well in her eyes, and she hides her face behind one of her pincers. The Garnet’s light pulses, subtly as a heartbeat, but Glimmer swears she can almost hear its wailing, like Scorpia must have heard it that first night after the war was over. Like an aching wind off the desert, cold with sorrow and loss.

“They would be _so_ proud of you. I knew you’d make a great Princess, and you have. We’d never have made it this far without you. You’re incredible, Scorpia! You’re so brave, and kind --” 

“Then why do I feel like the Garnet wants them, instead of me?”

Glimmer drags her fingers though the thin windblown scattering of sand over the rock beneath them. “There’s this -- mural, back home. Of my mom.” 

Scorpia nods. "I remember, I saw it. It was so pretty.”

“Well, it got destroyed -- I mean, most of it did, when the palace was hit. But we found some of the pieces, and we rebuilt it. It’s -- not a lot, but it’s something. Sometimes it helps, a little. Makes me feel a little more like there’s still some part of her that’s with me, that she's not just _gone_.” 

Glimmer looks up, wiping at her eyes, as Scorpia’s tail curls heavy and warm around her shoulders. “Do you think that would help? A mural?”

“Maybe. Maybe a statue? All the metal lying around -- you could melt it down. Put it right here, so you could come sit with it whenever you want, and the Garnet could -- remember.”

“Yeah.” Scorpia looks up. “I think she’d like that. Both my moms, together. Something like --” 

She sketches in the sand with the tip of one claw, just a rough outline that will disappear with the first footstep or breath of wind; two tall figures, claws clasped together. Their tails arch to meet over the Garnet warm and alive between them, the tips of their stingers just touching to form a heart.

**the color** **green**

Catra never spent much time in the bot factory, so there are fewer unpleasant memories to add dark irony to the new decor. Knots of wires have been replaced by tangles and wreaths of flowering vines, and water trickles down a metal aqueduct into a cute little fountain. There are cactus flowers everywhere. Lonnie leads them across a carpet of wilted petals to a cool booth in the corner, as far as possible from the gigantic neon sign over the door that reads THE NICE ZONE. Adora and Rogelio go to get the drinks. 

“So,” Lonnie says as soon as they’re out of earshot. “You and Adora, huh?”

“Yeah.” Catra flicks an ear back, playing it cool, knowing Lonnie can definitely see through her like the flimsiest visor polymer. 

“Well it’s about damn time. Most of us were betting on you two hooking up _years_ ago. You know what was always the most annoying thing about you, Catra? You never appreciated what you had. That girl has loved you forever, and all you ever focused on was how she hurt you. What made you finally admit it?” 

Catra bristles, then sighs. Instinctively her hand goes to the back of her neck, to the tangled scar there. “Getting chipped. Getting killed _twice_. Saving the world.” 

“I know how you feel,” Kyle says quietly. Catra blinks at him. She’d almost forgotten he was there. “I mean, not the saving the world part, but the rest of it. I got chipped, too.”

 _“You_?” Catra snorts, then catches herself. “I mean, uh -- that’s rough. It sucked, didn’t it.” 

“Yeah,” Lonnie says. “It did.” In answer to Catra’s raised eyebrow she says, “We tied Kyle up when we realized what was going on, but he must have gotten out somehow. He chipped me.”

“And then you chipped Rogelio?” Catra glances back over her shoulder. Rogelio stands out like a moss-covered stone, head and shoulders above the crowd at the bar. Adora laughs at something he says and playfully shoves him, like she’s been doing ever since he got his growth spurt and suddenly towered over them all.

“No,” Lonnie’s saying. “I must have tried to, but I didn’t pull it off. Ro kept us safe. He found some kind of crashed ship, it must have been one of Prime’s, and he made it into this sort of cage --”

“But a really nice cage,” Kyle adds hastily. “There was a bed and everything!”

“-- and he kept us there, fed us, made sure we couldn’t get out and get at him, or hurt anyone else, or get ourselves killed. He doesn’t like to talk about it, but it must have been _weeks_. All by himself, while we tried to get him to let us out.” She pauses. “Then one day the chips fell off, and we woke up and realized…” 

She trails off. Kyle says, “He was so scared. He won’t say so, but I know he was. But he loved us too much to let us get hurt.”

Lonnie squeezes Kyle’s hand. “Didn’t care if _he_ got hurt. I almost got him with a laser rifle. The big green idiot.” 

The big green idiot and the buff blonde idiot are weaving their way back now, each with a tray of fruity-looking drinks in cactus shells. “Yeah,” Catra sighs, “I know the feeling.”

“And everyone’s heard what you did!” Kyle says brightly, as Adora and Rogelio slide back into their seats and pass out cacti. “She-Ra saved the world and defeated Horde Prime!”

Adora puts an arm around Catra. “Actually, Catra’s the one who saved the world.”

“Shut up.” Catra knocks back half her drink, which tastes predictably like watermelon and sunshine. It’s lumpy with fruit pulp, but most of their drinks were lumpy in the Horde. It’s kind of nice, and an excellent distraction from the hot blush heating her face. “I did not.”

“With the power of looooooove,” Adora sings out. Lonnie smirks; Rogelio grins with all his teeth. Kyle’s got hearts in his eyes. 

Catra kicks Adora under the table. “Shut _up_! I have a reputation --” 

Lonnie rests her chin on one hand. “Yeah, as a lady-killer, apparently.”

Adora grins. “And you should see how romantic she is with Glimmer!”

“Glim --” Lonnie chokes on a slice of some weird blue fruit. “Hang on, the _Princess_ Glimmer? You’re dating her too?” 

“Queen Glimmer,” Catra mutters, sinking lower into her seat.

“But you _kidnapped_ her!” 

Catra slumps in the booth, turns her head aside. “That was a million years ago. I’ve done way worse stuff since then.”

“No. No, this is too much. Adora’s been stupid over you forever, and she didn't have a lot of other options, I can see that. But the _leader of the Princess Alliance_? How could _you_ possibly be this good at getting girls? You're -- you!” 

“Ouch,” Catra grumbles. 

Adora frowns, but before she can think of anything to say in Catra’s defense, Rogelio whispers to Kyle, who breaks down laughing.

Lonnie rounds on him. “What?”

“H-he said it’s - her animal magnetism,” Kyle chokes out.

Lonnie grins and settles back with her drink. “I guess it must be. A _Queen_? You are _way_ out of your league.” 

Catra rolls her eyes. “Like I don’t know that.”

Kyle slips his hand into Lonnie’s and kisses her cheek. “You’re not jealous, are you?”

Lonnie blushes, but doesn’t look away. “Jealous? No way. I wouldn’t want to get dragged into all that Princess shit.” She leans back, casually stretching an arm around Kyle. Her fingertips brush the little spines that bristle down the back of Rogelio's arm. “I’m happy with what I’ve got.”

“Are you guys staying here?” Adora asks. “It didn’t look like there were many buildings that still, you know. Had a roof.”

“No, we only came for the carnvial, cause Scorpia invited us. We’ve got our own place.” It's hard not to notice that she very deliberately doesn't say where.

“Ro and I have a garden!” Kyle chirps.

Catra rolls her eyes. “You don’t have to keep your location a secret, it’s not like I’m going to send an army of bots after you.”

Lonnie shrugs, _you never know_ , but Kyle leans forward across the table and whispers under the roar of conversation, “It’s not that. We figured it’s best to lay low, you know, in case... Shadow Weaver comes back.” 

Adora glances at Catra. Flushed, ashamed of her own superstitious outburst in the hangar, Catra says with casual disdain, “Oh, that. Yeah, you don’t have to worry, she’s not coming back.” 

Rogelio makes a noise that would have been a low, surprised whistle if he had lips. Lonnie, ever the skeptic, says, “You really believe that, huh?”

“More than any of the other times she pulled a stunt like this.” Catra shrugs and turns her attention back to scraping the last little bits of sweet fruit out of the bottom of her cactus. 

Adora says, “We saw her face.”

That shuts them up, at least. 

Kyle shakes off the horrified silence first. “What was it like? Actually, no, you know what, don’t tell me. I have enough nightmares about her as it is.”  Rogelio puts a comforting arm around him, which is hilarious because Rogelio’s bicep is about as big around as Kyle’s whole body. But it does the trick; Kyle relaxes, and says with genuine enthusiasm and not a little relief, “Well, in that case, maybe you guys should come visit us sometime!” 

Lonnie raises her cactus in a mocking toast. “And bring your Princess. I want to meet a Princess with taste that terrible.”

“She’s a _Queen_ ,” Catra growls. 

“We’d love to,” Adora says warmly. “It’ll be just like old times.”

The awkward silence that answers her seems to change her mind. “Except, you know, uh -- completely...different.”

Lonnie stares at her for a long minute, just to mess with her, then smiles -- not a smirk or a sneer this time, but the smile that no one but their squad ever saw, and that only rarely, after they'd done well in training and Catra hadn't brought any punishment down on them that day. “Works for me.”

**the stars**

They don’t get back from the Fright Zone until well after midnight, so late that the first moon is already dipping down below the canopy of the Whispering Woods. Bow parks Darla gently in the forecourt and shuts her systems down one by one while the others disembark and disperse, except Glimmer, who waits at the bottom of the gangplank to hug him goodnight before she whisks Catra and Adora away.

Bow has his own apartments in the palace now, but he doesn’t go to the residential wing. Instead he climbs up past the library and the auxiliary throne rooms, up four sweeping flights of stairs that grow narrower and narrower until they end in a heavy wooden door shut with a silver lock. 

The key was Glimmer’s present to him on his last birthday. The door swings open onto night and wind; Bow climbs up another staircase, this one carved into one of the castle’s exposed buttresses. He has to lean forward a little against the breeze, but it's not strong enough to make him doubt his footing. 

At the other end of the buttress, another door opens into pitch darkness and utter silence. Bow feels his way along the wall until he finds the button that unfolds the cover from the great dome above him, showing the magnified sky. Bright Moon can’t claim its observatory as Etheria’s first, because Entrapta had her own up and running in the Northern Reach three days after the end of the war; but she used what she learned from her prototypes to build this one at Glimmer’s request, and the dome is a transparent force shield infused with First Ones tech that can show Bow anything he asks for within 5.2 parsecs. Entrapta keeps promising him she can get it to ten parsecs by the next solstice. 

There’s a ladder leading up to the ledge that runs around the whole inner lip of the dome, so Entrapta’s non-flying bots can access it for maintenance and repairs. At the top of the ladder Bow’s stashed the comfiest pillows he could find and a heavy quilt embroidered with crescent moons.

He curls up in his little nest and pulls out his pad. The green glow bleeps and dissolves into Jewelstar’s face, lit by the warm red light of an alien sun that gleams on his optics like firelight.

“Hi,” Bow murmurs. “How’s space?”

“Spacious.” Jewelstar’s soft voice fills Bow with a warmth that chases away the chill of the stone at his back and the aches of a long day spent hunched over panels and screens. “Starla charged straight into a ravenous carax’s nest today, and Tallstar broke both wrist generators pulling her out. It was very exciting.”

“Oh, man, remind me to tell you about the time Glimmer tried to get herself eaten by a beetlemoose because one of the village kids bet she couldn’t teleport out from inside its stomach.”

Jewelstar laughs. “Could she?”

“Probably, but I talked her out of it. We were only eight, her mom would have banished me from the kingdom if I let an animal eat her.” Bow smothers a yawn with the back of his hand. “Sorry, it was kind of a long day. I helped Entrapta work on a weather grid for Etheria -- she’s trying to use the system of energy distribution that fed the Heart, but it’s tricky stuff.”

“You’ll need all your brainpower for this one,” Jewelstar warns him. “Are you sure you don’t want to go to sleep?”

“No, I want to talk to you. What time is it there?”

“The thirty-third division of the sixth diurnal. We’re on a new planet in a binary star system. There’s definitely evidence of derelict Horde ships in the plane of the planet’s orbit, and I think we’ll find spires tomorrow, I’ve detected the kind of radioactive isotopes that tend to decay from their power cells.” After Bow’s third yawn he hesitates. “Bow --”

“No, I’m awake! Hit me.”

“You’re sure?”

“Uh, do binary stars orbit a common center of mass?”

Jewelstar’s slow smile warms him like a distant nova. “All right.”

There’s a lag as the information crosses the vast blackness of interstellar space. When the file arrives, it automatically activates the subroutines that interface Bow’s pad with the observatory dome. The stars overhead sharpen, suddenly enhanced, and turn colors -- yellow, orange, blue. The game is to connect the ones that share the same mass within an order of magnitude without any two lines intersecting at more than a single point.

Jewelstar’s right, this is a complicated one. As Bow traces and erases tries on his pad, the interface draws them on the dome above his head in those same cheerful colors. 

“You don’t have to finish it,” Jewelstar says. He sounds worried, even embarrassed, which redoubles Bow’s resolve. 

“I’m almost there.” He can see the pattern sorting itself out. The sets of lines in each color spell out a word in First Ones runes; they came up with this game as a way to learn them, after Jewelstar started sending back samples he was finding on distant planets. “Aha! Did I get it?”

Now Jewelstar’s definitely embarrassed. “You got it.”

The message drawn on the sky reads: _I think you’re an angle of less than 90 degrees_.

“Awww! I think you’re a-cute too,” Bow laughs. Jewelstar’s blushing. Another form of radiance reaching him across the void of the universe. 

He leans the pad against the wall so he can see Jewelstar’s face and settles down into the quilt. “Not that this isn’t fun, but when are you guys coming back this way? I miss you.”

“I miss you, too.” Jewelstar’s cheeks are almost the same ruby red as his laser-sight. “We’re coming back towards your quadrant in another sixteen diurnals. We can meet on the edge of your system.”

"Good." Bow's more tired than he realized. It's hard to keep his eyes open. Before he can wake up enough to talk himself out of it, he sends his own star-puzzle back across the unfathomable distance to Jewelstar's communicator. "Just, uh...message me when you solve this one, okay? I've been working on it for a while."

"I will. Go to sleep."

He's already more than halfway there. He closes his eyes on Jewelstar's fond smile and tries to imagine what his face will look like a few hours from now, when he decodes the puzzle Bow sent him and finds the words _can I kiss you sometime?_ traced out in the orbits of alien stars. 

**Author's Note:**

> "when words aren't enough, part II" was largely inspired by this comic by @artofkace on tumblr, which is just the single most in-character thing I've ever seen in my entire life:
> 
> https://artofkace.tumblr.com/post/615056299850366976/the-scene-where-adora-finally-realizes-rushing 
> 
> Cited with permission. Also thanks to @artofkace in general for feeding my Catra/Adora/Glimmer polyship hopes and dreams!

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[Podfic] An Atlas of Uncharted Lands](https://archiveofourown.org/works/28027512) by [cas_tielle](https://archiveofourown.org/users/cas_tielle/pseuds/cas_tielle)




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